Curiosity: We need more of it
Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought him back. A rhyme from my childhood but for me, it invokes a plea for more curiosity. I know everybody has a knowledge bank and as I was sitting on the John this morning the idea that the word curiosity and its implementation ought to be right at the top of everybody’s knowledge bank deposit slip. Curiosity for me is such a reassuring idea for it gives hope that if one of us is in a funk, curiosity gives hope that a new direction in one’s life will yield new opportunities to escape the world of funk.
My granddaughter Samantha just arrived home from a wonderful and rewarding trip to Tanzania, Africa. It was a one-month stay at the home of her host family where she would live while teaching English at a daycare center to children aged two to eight years old from 10 o’clock in the morning to 2 o’clock in the afternoon. The village where she taught was quite poor as old time-honored traditions were still in command. Whereby the chief of the tribe can have 10 or more wives and many children. The chief’s wealth and standing in the community is measured by how many cattle he owns. The cattle are never eaten as that would reduce his wealth. Consequently, the land is seriously overgrazed leaving an impoverished landscape that produces only enough food for the tribe to spend their lives living on a daily subsistence diet of rice and beans.
Sammy went on to say that this way of living might seem archaic by our Western standards but it produces a lot of happy children. It made me curious about our very consumptive society that is burning through our natural resources rapidly. Our society is quite the opposite. Take Silicon Valley’s ability to create change so quickly like the two-second attention spans, artificial intelligence, and the whole computer industry with all its objective and subjective possibilities created by curiosity. I feel that Pandora has definitely been let out of the box and my Crystal ball right now is definitely clouded over when dealing with the possibility that change might be happening faster than our human abilities to absorb all this new knowledge and then use it constructively. One test to see if our rapidly evolving society is making things better would be, to count if there are more smiling faces than frowning faces. Jack, now that’s stupid in our politically polarized world of today. But I’m curious, I want to see if somebody could invent a gadget that would measure all the laughter and the tears and see who’s winning.
But what I do know right now is, we need to be less dogmatic and self-righteous. So let’s start by gobbling up a good helping of love and laughter, being decent to one another, and restoring law and order. I believe if we are curious enough there is that place between obesity and skinny where nobody gets the whole loaf and we might find we don’t need so much stuff like the happy hungry children of Tanzania.
See Ya,
Jack