Good adjustment means that you let others see who you really are instead of who you wish they think you are. ~@sgbrownlow
The collective wisdom available in the mass of humanity is absolutely amazing.
When I actually think about the small wave of that wisdom that I’m exposed to every morning as I work my way through TED Talks, Twitter, LinkedIn, Harvard Business Review, Links for Shrinks, HuffPost, the various bloggers I follow (and my wonderful, wise Facebook friends) I feel privileged and enriched. I’m also getting up earlier and earlier because all of this surfing takes so darn long, but that’s another post.
While it’s also true that the Internet is an uncensored, uncurated repository for every little bit of flotsam and jetsam ever uploaded, whether good, bad, or truly horrifying, it is also the repository of people’s passions, of learning, and of sharing. You might not particularly want what I have to share, but someone does. And the opposite is true. I might be looking for exactly the bit of information you contributed. And for those with an insatiable curiosity to know stuff (pick me) the Internet is like Fort Knox – I know all the gold is in there, I just have to find the right door and the correct combination and it’s all mine. Furthermore, finding the right door and the correct combination is an interesting process itself.
Today I have learned about conductive ink made in someone’s garage, open-source plans for a car made of a bicycle, and ‘Haptography’ developments happening at Penn State. I watched a TED Talk that I passed on to Bill (“Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do“) so that he is properly prepared to spend the summer with our grandsons, and I retweeted about half a dozen great quotes/ideas from the Tweeps I follows ~ because they were worth passing on. It’s amazing what can be said in 140 characters.
All of that to say that learning, for me, is a never ending pursuit that began with a curiosity that has never been assuaged. That curiosity was nurtured in my family by parents who refused to have a TV, forced us to play outside the majority of the time (doing boring things like building forts in the hay mow or having mock battles with sticks and dried cow plops) and who would stop what they were doing to answer childish questions. “I don’t know why that’s happening. Shall we see if we can figure it out?”
Back to therapy. When I, as a therapist, can find a spark of curiosity (about anything) in a client, and nurture it into questions that we can answer together, my experience has been that the client then begins to feel empowered regarding his/her own situation. There is something about the nature of curiosity that generalizes into useful, practical life skills. When curiosity is absent, so is creativity… courage… flexibility… interest… all of the things that make problem-solving possible.
What are you curious about?
Related articles
P.S. Bill just asked what I was doing – I said, “Writing a post on curiosity.”
“Oh. You mean, like, ‘Curiosity killed the cat?'”
“Um… not exactly.”
*sigh*