4 Part Series - Gratitude, Kindness, Curiosity, and Laughter

DAY 3 — CURIOSITY - I Don't Want to Decide I Know Someone Before I Really Do.

Curiosity interrupts the story we've already created about someone. Instead of asking, “What's wrong with them?” I want to ask, “What's going on with them?” Sometimes understanding doesn't change my mind. It simply changes my heart.

Yesterday was about kindness, and about the uncomfortable realization that the people closest to us don't deserve whatever version of ourselves happens to walk through the door after a bad day. Today I'm thinking about curiosity, which might be the quietest of these four qualities and, in some ways, the one I find most challenging. Curiosity asks me to slow down before I decide I understand. That's not always easy. My brain likes shortcuts. Yours probably does too. We see a person behave a certain way and immediately build a story around it. He's arrogant. She's difficult. They don't care. He's selfish. She's judging me. And once that story gets built, everything else tends to become evidence for it. That's the trap. Curiosity interrupts the story. It says, Wait. What else could be true? Maybe that's why I think curiosity is so valuable. It gives people room to be more complicated than my first impression of them.

I don't want to become someone who thinks he has everyone figured out. What a miserable way to move through the world. There are still too many things I don't know, and I like that. There are places I've never seen, conversations I haven't had, books I haven't opened, trails I haven't walked, ideas I haven't considered because it simply hasn't occurred to me to consider them yet. There are people sitting three feet away from me who have lived entire lives I know almost nothing about. That's fascinating. What made you who you are? What changed you? What do you worry about when nobody is watching? What are you proud of? What did you learn the hard way? What makes you laugh until your stomach hurts? What are you still trying to figure out? Sometimes we ask people what they do for a living when what we'd really like to know is what makes them feel alive. We just don't ask. Maybe we should. "Tell me more" might be one of the most generous sentences in the language.

Curiosity also gives me somewhere to go when I feel myself getting angry. This is where it becomes practical. Somebody doesn't return my message and my mind starts filling in the blanks. They're ignoring me. They don't care. I've done something wrong. Someone seems distant and I immediately wonder what I've done. Someone disagrees with me and suddenly I'm preparing a defense before they've even finished speaking. The human brain is astonishingly efficient at inventing explanations, particularly explanations in which we are either the victim or the hero. Curiosity offers another possibility: I wonder what's going on with them. That's it. Nothing magical. Just a different question. Maybe they're exhausted. Maybe something happened. Maybe they're scared. Maybe they see the situation completely differently. Maybe, occasionally, they're actually being unreasonable. Fine. Curiosity doesn't mean excusing everything. It means gathering the rest of the story before passing judgment. I don't have to agree with someone to understand them. I don't have to change my mind because I listened. Sometimes understanding another person's perspective simply makes disagreement less personal.

And that's probably the kind of curiosity I want most: the kind that keeps me open. Open to people. Open to being surprised. Open to changing my mind. Open to discovering that something I was certain about wasn't quite as certain as I thought. I don't want to confuse confidence with certainty or experience with omniscience. I've lived enough life to know that I can be completely convinced of something and still be wrong. It's humbling. Good. I probably need more of it. Tomorrow is the final day of this series, and we're talking about laughter. Gratitude helps me notice. Kindness changes how I treat people. Curiosity keeps me asking questions. But laughter is the one that reminds me not to turn all this self-improvement into another thing I have to perform perfectly. Life is already serious enough. I think we should leave some room for being ridiculous.