Maybe it’s time we cultivate curiosity again. Aren’t you curious?
About what makes people tick?
About where all the dinosaurs went?
About what life would be like growing up in rural Mongolia?
About what the fall of this year is going to bring us?
We were all taught that “curiosity killed the cat,” mainly by parents who were tired of all of our “but why?” questions.
The truth is, curiosity is a golden gift.
It keeps us wondering.
It keeps us fresh.
In his book, Everything Is Spiritual, Rob Bell says,
Despair is the spiritual disease of believing that tomorrow will simply be a repeat of today. Nothing new. The future simply an unbroken string of todays, one after another. But curiosity, curiosity disrupts despair, insisting that tomorrow will not be a repeat of today. Curiosity whispers to you, ‘You’re just getting started.’
I have to admit – the last eighteen months have bullied my curiosity into a corner. Every time we would get through a wave of suffering, I would anticipate a brighter tomorrow. And for a year and a half, I’ve suffered a lot of disappointment, as has almost everyone I know.
I sometimes stop being curious, because I don’t really want to know what’s next. I don’t want to read tomorrow’s headlines when tomorrow gets here. But my old Pastor, Rick Warren, taught me that life isn’t so much a roller coaster of ups and downs as it is a set of railroad tracks. The good and bad circumstances of life often run alongside each other.
Through the hardest months and moments of this season, I have to admit there have been a lot of bright spots. Things like:
Pride in something my kids accomplished.
Those two beach vacations.
Meeting new people who impacted me positively.
Starting something new, like real estate.
I want to cultivate curiosity again. Because, as Rob said, curiosity whispers to me that the best might just be yet to come.
How do you do that? How does one cultivate curiosity in this era?
I believe it’s a matter of opening our spiritual eyes so that we don’t miss the moments that matter, the people that shape us, and the opportunities that come along. It’s about reading and exploring and taking risks.
I don’t know what’s next, but I’m tired of dreading the possibility of everything being bleak.
So with some hopefulness, I’m going to cultivate curiosity again.
And maybe tomorrow will just be awesome.
This article about cultivating curiosity originally appeared here, and is used by permission.
