I’ve been thinking about curiosity lately, and the doors it opens to life. I notice I’ve become much more curious than I used to be. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I’ve returned to a more curious mindset.
Like a lot of us, I had it when I was young. And like a lot of people, as I got older, I became less curious. That’s what can happen when the world and our experience of life start to feel old and stale. It’s easy and common to fall into the trap of assuming, “That’s just the way life is.”
Life isn’t like that at all. Life is always brand new every second. The only time it seems old and boring is when we assume that’s the way it has to be, because that can appear to be the reality of the adult world.
When Life Starts to Feel Stale
What’s really happening when our experience of life seems stale? It means our vision has become stale. It’s very much like looking through a pair of glasses that are greasy and grimy. The view looks dirty, but the dirt is on the glasses, not on the view we’re looking at.
Curiosity can instantly wash those glasses clean, and the resulting view is clear and interesting, because when human beings look through “clean glasses,” everything is interesting.
The Value of Curiosity
I remember reading a story about an explorer who was often in extremely remote places, seeing things few people had seen. He got married, had kids, and suddenly exploring in the way he had been doing was no longer practical if he wanted to be with his children and watch them grow up. So he adapted.
He lived near what had once been an old industrial landscape. He decided to go exploring there, and this was the way he described his attitude: “I decided to treat everything as interesting.”
When I read that line, I remember thinking it was so brilliant that I got excited and decided it was going to be a guiding principle for me.
The truth is, my curiosity had been returning and growing for some time, so I already saw its value. But “treating everything as interesting” supercharged my curiosity. Frankly, it supercharged my life.
The “glasses” I look through are usually clean now. Because that’s become my norm, when the glasses are dirty, I get an off-kilter feeling. That’s all it takes to remind me to look through clean glasses. (By the way, metaphorical glasses are much easier and faster to clean.) When I do that, the world becomes interesting again.
Curiosity and the People in Our Lives
This way of seeing works especially well when we’re dealing with people. When I meet someone new, or even encounter them on the street, I don’t feel tempted to make assumptions based on what I think I know about them from visual cues like dress, manner, and speech.
In other words, I give myself the ability to see them as they are, not as I assume they’re going to be. I let them be who they are, not who my judgment decides they are.
As well as it works with strangers, it works even more dramatically with people I know well. And better still with people I find difficult to deal with.
I learned this question from Barbara Patterson, and it works like a charm: “I wonder what I haven’t seen about this person?”
The most astonishing thing about using that question is what happens to the other person—even the one I’ve decided is “difficult.” They seem to sense an opening, and more often than not, the exchange between us becomes something much nicer and more interesting than it otherwise would have been.
It’s as though we’re agreeing to put everything we think we know about each other aside. It lets me see who they really are, and lets them see who I really am.
And maybe that’s one of the great gifts of curiosity. It doesn’t just give us something new to look at. It gives us the opportunity to discover that what we thought we already knew was never the whole story.
The world hasn’t become stale. The people around us haven’t become boring. Life hasn’t run out of surprises.
We’ve simply forgotten to look.
And curiosity is one of the easiest ways I know to begin looking again.
Related Reading
I first wrote about that explorer’s simple decision a couple of years ago, when it was still new to me. If you’d like to see where this way of looking began, you might enjoy I Decided to Treat Everything as Interesting.
