Curiosity makes you smart, silly, and sensational. Curiosity helps you retain Wonder, which is grand! Curiosity drives knowledge growth, which can never hurt… Yet, “curiosity killed the cat” Yikes! Splat!
Curiosity didn’t kill Curious George, a monkey of a kid-like character who got into constant trouble – enough to fill dozens and dozens of books since 1973. Was it one of your childhood favs?
Here’s what it means: cu·ri·os·i·ty. Two meanings actually and both are nouns. (that is people or places or things – you?)
1. a strong desire to know or learn something. Used thus, “filled with curiosity, she peered through the window”
2. a strange or unusual object or fact. Here’s this meaning at work: “he showed them some of the curiosities of the house”
To be curious is a verb, to act, not an act.
Curious gets one into trouble but has enormous perks and rewards. Knowledge, personal growth, friends, and fame. A forestall of Alzheimer’s or just plain world-weary, espousing disinterest in all. An old Boomer-aged dog.
Lack of curiosity kills a conversation. Especially when you kindly inquire about other people’s lives, vacation plans and past trips, children and grandchildren and selves – and they don’t ask you back.
This has become a constant in coversation, in my experience, in the past several years. The good news is that it’s replaced forced-upon-me political diatribe; the bad news is that it’s soul-killing. If the experience were not shared by my dear husband, he of the salesman’s alacrity and charm, I’d be forced to take the matter personally and inquire within.
What’s become of a country that’s become insular and narcissistic? Where residents seem universally uncurious and insecure? Did someone move America, the land of the free and the brave?
Freedom and bravery are core qualities – and results – of curiosity. A trait which my husband and I hold dear.
Curiosity sparks adventure! Just do it! Inquire.
I’ll close this rant-like post with a quote from one of my favorite quotables, Albert Einstein: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” Me, too.
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