I saw my old friends Julie and Eva this weekend. They ask a lot of questions. I mean, just in normal conversation, they ask a LOT of questions. It's like listening to two people who both speak, say, Icelandic, going back and forth with rare and beautiful fluency. I can kind of keep up, but they're definitely ahead of me this way.
Maybe it's a professional side effect. We all met in college as baby journalists, then became actual journalists, where we got paid to be nosy. Julie switched gears to become a nurse, but that is also a question-asking profession.
In any case, Julie and Eva are both naturally, deliciously inquisitive, and when I'm around them, awash in their questions of each other and of me, I remember the rare beauty of curiosity. I can't help but wonder whether the mess we find ourselves in today, what with the hating and all, couldn't be alleviated if more of us treated curiosity like a sacred duty.
Of course, this requires suspending our own ever-so-alluring stories and opinions. But the payoff! Curiosity feeds empathy and collaboration and wisdom and creativity. It prunes the ego and nips at narcissism. There might even be a damned funny story on the other end of that line.
So, sure. Journalists need to be curious, but so do good nurses and inspired artists and fair judges and effective politicians. And lovers and friends and parents. When curiosity gets forgotten, other things begin to fail.
Shutting up now. I'd love you to tell me something about you that I don't know.Anything; any category of thing. Maybe there's something you'd tell people if only they asked. Well, I'm asking.
Just 'cause.
Just curious.