curiosity

“Every journey is a question of sorts, and the best journeys are the ones in which every question opens into deeper and more searching questions.”

— Pico Iyer, The Pilgrim’s Way on Waking Up

No one talks about the way in which the world, in all of its bewildering capability, is, at every second, offering some detail that might lead to a new way of framing, of thinking, of imagining. The delight of reading involves developing an awareness of the way so many people pay attention to this world, and to themselves.

Even if you know what it feels like to be completely open to where your curiosity wants you to go, like Grothendieck, it is a fragile state. It often takes considerable work to keep the creative state from collapsing, especially as your work becomes successful and the social expectations mount. When I listen to interviews with creative people or

Radical Curiosity is what allows us to experience the joy and the wonder of bringing absurd impossibilities to fruition.

Curiosity cannot be cultivated inside cultures that treat knowledge exclusively as a static object in which engagement with thinking is positioned as the banking of information. Human beings are not savings accounts, they are originators of value creation—one of the key attributes of curiosity.