Curiosity as a Compass

I grew up in a deeply religious home without television, which meant I had two things in abundance: books and time.

I read constantly. Books were entertainment, obviously, but they also had an interesting habit of introducing questions nobody had specifically invited into the house. Reading exposed me to versions of good and evil, history, humanity and belief that were considerably more complicated than the answers I had been given.

I don't think anyone intended that growing up without television would lead me down a lifelong path of questioning why things are the way they are.

But here we are.

Curiosity has a way of doing that. One question leads to another, and eventually you find yourself somewhere you never expected to be, looking at something familiar from an entirely different angle.

I have become more curious as I've gotten older, not less. Experience has made the world bigger. Travel made it bigger still. Every new place introduced another history, another culture, another way people had organized themselves and decided what mattered. The more of the world I saw, the more there was to wonder about.

Museums are particularly good places for this.

The spectacular objects get most of the attention. The enormous paintings. The jewels. The things that belonged to someone important enough that we still know their name. But I am often more interested in the quieter objects.

A pen, for example.

It doesn't look like much sitting behind glass. But pens have written love letters and declarations of war. They have recorded births and deaths, signed laws, kept diaries, written terrible poetry and very good books. An ordinary object can sit silently in a museum containing none of those words and still represent volumes.

The simplicity is part of the richness.

The same is true of the ordinary things people leave behind: tools, dishes, clothing, the remnants of homes. These objects remind us that history wasn't populated exclusively by kings, generals and people dramatically pointing toward the horizon.

Most people were just people. They had work to do, children to raise, food to find, neighbors who probably irritated them, things they worried about and things they hoped would happen.

The materials change. The tools change. The social structures change. The basic arrangement is surprisingly persistent. Thousands of years later, we are still trying to figure out how to live together.

We have made extraordinary progress. In many parts of the world, suffering has been reduced in ways our ancestors could scarcely have imagined. We can cross oceans in hours, speak instantly to someone on the other side of the planet and carry access to vast amounts of human knowledge in our pockets.

We have done all this and remain remarkably capable of arguing with our neighbors.

Some problems, apparently, are resistant to technological advancement.

But our struggles aren't the only things connecting us. People thousands of years ago also loved each other. They wanted their children to have good lives. They made beautiful things, told stories, laughed and grieved. They wanted to matter.

There is something grounding about realizing this. Human history is unimaginably vast when measured against one life, but curiosity allows us to reach into it. We can look at an object made by someone whose name disappeared thousands of years ago and recognize the hands behind it.

Someone made this. Someone used this. Someone needed this.

For a moment, the distance between us becomes smaller.

Travel has given me a similar experience. The more places I have been fortunate enough to see, the harder it has become to think of the world as a collection of abstractions. Places become people, and history becomes physical.

You stand somewhere humans have been standing for centuries and realize that every generation probably believed, at least occasionally, that they were living through uniquely ridiculous times.

Perhaps they were. Perhaps we are.

Curiosity doesn't necessarily provide answers. If anything, it tends to produce more questions, and I think that's part of its value.

Certainty can make the world smaller. Once we decide we understand something completely, there is very little reason to keep looking at it. Curiosity leaves the door open.

What if I don't understand this yet? What happened here? Why did they believe that? What would this look like from somewhere else? Who decided this was normal?

That last question alone can keep a person occupied indefinitely.

The questions I ask now are larger than the ones I asked as a child with a book in my hands, but I recognize the impulse behind them. I still want to know what is behind the answer I've been given.

The more I learn about people, places and history, the more I think that underneath all our different languages, beliefs, customs and centuries, most of us want remarkably similar things.

We want to matter. We want lives that contain happiness and joy. We want to love and be loved. We want to contribute something to the lives of the people around us. We want our children to inherit something better than what we inherited.

We don't always agree on how to accomplish any of this. History has documented that rather thoroughly.

But there is something reassuring about recognizing the continuity.

For me, curiosity is a compass because it keeps pointing outward, toward another place, another person, another century, another question. Not because I expect to find the final answer, but because I have learned that the world gets larger every time I discover how much more there is to know.