Tag: curiosity

  • A Call to Look and Learn

    05.10.11 | Comment?

    by Kevin Neill

    While it may be true that the most profound lessons are learned through personal failure and pain, the most joyful lessons are those that come as the fruit of our own curiosity. When we are able to come to the world as children, unafraid to approach and examine, what we find has as much life-changing potential as any painful fall or scuffed knee. What we find is a world made for the express purpose of being found, a world of endless unfolding and peerless beauty, and we are drawn into and through this world on the wings of curiosity.

    Sadly, our habit has often been to take the beauty of this world and transform it into something that discourages curiosity: we craft for ourselves a world that is fundamentally bent against discovery, bent against learning and knowing. Out of a desire to ward off the ill effects of anxiety, boredom, and fear, we have enfolded ourselves in a predictability so dense that it prevents the growth and effect of our own curious nature, insulating us from the very world we were made to discover. Worst of all, the density of predictability also shuts out our curiosity about other people.

    If we are going to be agents of change in this world, participating in the unfolding of God’s kingdom, we first need to slough off the pall of the predictable and learn how to be curious, again. We need to break up our routine, walk in different shoes and look through different eyes, and find in ourselves a desire to know and to be known.

    How long has it been since you stopped being curious and stopped learning? How long since you felt like you finally had life figured out?  I’m betting that it’s been about as long as the time since life finally settled down, got comfortable, and became really and truly boring.

    Shake it up, people.