The Lost Art of Curiosity

It’s been some time since I had experienced this feeling, of my thoughts slowing down. The last time I did was maybe a few months ago.

But nonetheless, it is a very tranquil feeling… to just sit back and relax my mind, freeing myself of the thoughts that zoom through my mind.

It makes me feel a strange calm, almost as if I am finally free of a huge burden.

Whenever such moments happen, I just sit with a journal but this time I am writing on my digital journal.

Life has been moving so fast.. maybe you might have also felt the same. I still feel like I had celebrated new year just started a month ago but here we are, nearing the end of this year. It is like this because life has been such a routine for me and you. Waking up and doing the same thing over and over again, without even having a second thought about it.

Lately everything has been a race, a hustle of doing good in life.

I go for random walks every now and then, and sometimes I can’t help but think about my childhood.. when everything I did was out of pure curiosity, with no intentions of getting something out of it. Times when I did things for the sake of curiosity itself. My childhood dream was to become like Bear Grylls and to go safari and explore the entire jungles of this world. Another dream was to become a mad scientist and explore different planets and stars and galaxies. Both Bear and Tesla were my childhood heroes.

The feeling of packing my bags a night before going to my school, taking an encyclopedia with me so that I can sit with my friends, with that book open and look at different things in awe, wondering if I could have all of them in front of me.

Then get back home, start the TV and switch to Nat Geo or Discovery channel and look at life happen. That’s it. With no worries of being a part of any race.

I feel like curiosity is an integral part of everyone’s childhood. It must have been the same for you. You must have been curious about something and had crazy dreams like me.

You didn’t need to turn your curiosity into a career. You didn’t need to monetize it, put it on a resume, or prove that it was useful. You could simply wonder.

But somehow, with time, all of that just vanished. As I grew older, I found myself becoming a part of this invisible race, one that none of us were forced into, yet we all are a part of this race. It might be a race for marks, a job, or money. It doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that, somewhere along the way, the majority of us left our curious side behind.

At some point along the journey, we begin to ask ourselves a different question. Rather than “I wonder what that is” we ask, “What will I gain from learning about it?” Even the things we love start to feel like investments in some future version of ourselves.

And there is a strange irony in that. We spend years trying to build a life in which we’re free to do what we want, but in the process, we sometimes lose the ability to do things simply because we want to.

I genuinely wish to get it back, so that once again I can do things not just for the sake of doing them like a routine work.

I also feel like curiosity can become a guiding purpose of anyone’s life if they want to live their life that way. It can give them meaning over pressure. A teacher of mine who teaches us human values once asked our class a question, “What is your purpose in life?”. At that time I didn’t had any answer and it made me think why. And that was not the first time, that this question had been asked from me.

But I think if I had an answer back then, it would have been this.

My purpose in life is to live with an insatiable curiosity, to keep exploring the world, to follow the questions that fascinate me, and remain open to changing my mind, my direction and my understanding of life. Rather than committing myself to a single destination. I want the joy of this journey and the freedom to keep evolving the foundation of my life.

Stay curious.