How curiosity helps in every corner of life

It can help us in our pain, in our grief, in our conflicts, in dealing with exhaustion, and how we say yes too often.  It can help us understand many things that otherwise perplex us.  It can help us grow in what would otherwise be despairing situations.  It’s simply curiosity.

Curiosity is basically my main tool in the craft of counselling.  It’s really why counselling works so well as a healing agent in the humanities.  Curiosity is an intense interest utterly devoid of fear yet surging with wonder.  Curiosity searches out things that we otherwise get cynical about or give up on.

I want to show you what I mean by curiosity—it’s probably not what you think it is.  And when we try it faithfully, we find it works because it literally changes the way we behave from the moment we try it.  Curiosity changes us through a radically different focus.

First, here’s more about the situations it can help:

1.             GRIEF – lengthening windows of acceptance is the goal of recovering from grief, all the while not despising the aspects of denial, bargaining, anger, and depression.  Because there’s no way to shortcut grief, there’s the ideal invitation to curiosity, to learn about it, to learn how to sit in the lament and be still, to learn what we can learn.  Succeed in curiosity in grief and we transcend the pain and become infinitely deeper persons.

2.             ANXIETY – this is often a conundrum, “Why am I so full of fear, worry, and concern?” Because anxiety is a conundrum, it invites us on a journey of curiosity to understand it.  Like with grief, it’s a journey that takes a significant portion of our lives.  Learning through curiosity isn’t a race, yet it does help.  Just being curious tends to alleviate some anxiety.

3.             CONFLICT – when we end up in conflict with another person, we have an ideal opportunity to learn more about them and more about ourselves—if only we can stay open from feeling upset, and through curiosity we prevent ourselves from getting too upset.  We can learn why we responded the wrong way, just like we can learn why they responded the way they did.  With curiosity we learn compassion for the one we’re in conflict with, and we gain power to understand what we can own.

4.             EXHAUSTION AND BURNOUT – there are always things we can learn about ourselves and our living situations that augur well for the future.  Getting exhausted and burnt out isn’t the end, it’s actually a vital part of learning what doesn’t work from what works.  It’s all part of life experience.  Part of coming back from burnout is learning how we burned out in the first place, so we don’t do it again.

5.             DISTRESS – pressure crushes us at times, yet unless we face these times, we have no way of learning what we need to learn to deal better with the distressing situations.  Although failure never feels good, it is good, because we learn nothing from success.  Best we don’t judge ourselves for getting ‘stressed out’.  Failure is an invigorator of curiosity because it shows us what we find unpalatable and that inspires us to change.

What I mean by curiosity is a new way of thinking that, if it dominates our life, can give us a huge amount of peace, because we become innate learners and wonderers.

Truly, it’s the capacity to learn from anything and everything that is central to resilience.

What curiosity demands, though, is surrender.

We can’t be open and prideful at the same time, or angry, or frustrated, or fearful.  The openness of curiosity is the elixir we need for our pain because openness in the presence of pain is the doorway to brokenness and healing.