Curiosity

Those kids, they start to ask “why?” at such a young age, they question everything, it is their way of learning. It can get repetitive and boring, but it is so important in order to learn about life, the universe and everything. As someone who likes to know why in so many circumstances, I struggle when I am asked the same question repeatedly. I understand the importance of the answer, but even more so that you teach them to get to the answer themselves. You shouldn’t take people’s word for it.

Children soon realise when you give them a ridiculous answer to a straightforward question, but as we get older, we start to believe things we hear or even worse, we stop asking. We think we get to a point in life where there isn’t much more to learn. Or we decide we don’t want to learn anything else. Our brains are full. There is a lot of talk in the media about the demise of journalism and what it means for our politics. Less and less people to question what is going on, to pull apart different sides of a story, to evaluate, question, dig for facts. Whichever way you look at it, it is essentially professional curiosity. Done on our behalf. However, it is still through the lens of someone else’s bias.

We need to ask these questions for ourselves and dig deep for the answers. It is not to say that we will be right. Scientists the world over would say that there are no right answers, just more questions, but just because we can’t be right, just less wrong, we should still be asking the questions.

We should be asking why we do what we do; why others do what they do; why things work in a certain way; why they can’t work in a different way; what can be done better; are we settling for this because it is easy; are we any closer to the right answer; is that the outcome we want; Is that the goal we are aiming for; is that the best way?

How about tomorrow, you start asking yourself why you do a certain task in a certain way or get to know someone you don’t know very well or learn to do a task that you don’t know how to do. Simple steps to being more curious and by extension, learning something new.

Never stop being curious.

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