Curiouser and curiouser

Curiosity.

This is a quality that humans possess to a greater or lesser degree.  I seem to possess it to a greater degree.  I'm increasingly glad about that as I age.  Curiosity was fostered in me as a child, and is something which is easily overlooked in 'personal qualities which we value most'.

Curiosity is the reason I love to learn new things.  As a child, it was drawing and painting everything I saw, learning to play music, tramping through the wild NZ bush for days on end, living in the mountains with few of the modern comforts such as electricity and  flushing toilets, overhearing family conversations during dinner about evolution and DNA and fossils and orchids and Scott and kiwis and moas and the rectum of the earthworm.  As a young adult, it was travelling to endless countries with strange and wonderful cultures, languages where you could express things you can't say in English, trying food like jellyfish and snails and frogs and caterpillars and anything I'd never heard of, and working in nine different 'careers' before I discovered my best fit.  As a somewhat older adult, it is making new discoveries about the incredible natural world in which we live, such as these:

-    Asperatus clouds are so rare they weren't classified until 2009. They often break up quickly without producing a storm.  Photo: Witta Priester (New Zealand).

     -    Octopuses have nine brains, and blue blood

-   Ants never sleep, and they don't have lungs

-   During late summer, faint eerie glows can be seen in forests around the world, where bioluminescent mushrooms grow on moist, rotting bark.  This is called foxfire. Photo: Ylem

'Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything,' said Albert Einstein.  It doesn't have to be weird and exotic, either.  It can be as simple as looking at moss through a magnifying glass or discovering that some male birds sing more than 2000 times a day. Or that horseflies always hum in the key of F.

I am currently trying to learn a new language, compose on the harp and mandolin (none of these very well), and explore buddhism, taoism, and qi gong.  My biggest complaint is that there isn't enough time in the week, with a full-time job.  But my point is, you don't have to be 'good' at anything.  Simply enjoying the process of learning something new, which usually arises from an innate curiosity about anything that catches your eye (or ear). 

My parents attempted to answer most of my endless questions as a child, and would make no bones about looking up the answers in encyclopaedias if they didn't know (if it existed in a textbook somewhere, they generally already knew it).  This made me unashamed of not knowing stuff.  It also made me realise that the first step was to try to find out if somebody else already knows the stuff, and learn from them.  And if they don't, wondering about all the possible reasons for whatever stuff I'm curious about.  But you can develop this quality at any age, by consciously asking yourself questions about all that you experience and observe.

So, when I go for walks, I get curious about architecture, about weeds and birdsong, about how to start a fire using only friction.  I wonder which plants are edible and what the names of the clouds are above me.  I look at an elderly person alone on a park bench and think of the years of rich history behind them and all the people they must have cared for and lost, and the skills and knowledge they must have acquired along the way, and I wonder why they have become all but invisible citizens in our western civilisation.

I think that if you want to be a writer, curiosity is your best weapon.  But even if you don't want to write, this quality makes you interested in others, interested in yourself, interested in life.  Which is surely of high value as a human being.

And did you know this? In Alaska it's illegal to whisper in someone's ear while they're moose hunting.