My mind feels alive when I am curious, seeking and exploring ideas. Yet I have been warned that my intellectual curiosity may get me in trouble. I would warn against believing that warning. In the case of ones marked curiosity, I have never met a really curious person who isn’t also a good listener, and I never met a person who was skilful or well prepared and not also a good listener.
There is that old misquote that has become a societal meme. People say that curiosity killed the cat, but that was actually mistakenly concluded from an observation of Shakespeare. He said care killed the cat. Care meaning worry, which is actually true. Curiosity is in no way a weakness. What makes people think it is, is because they mistake compulsive behaviour for curiosity. We all know people who ask questions they don’t really want the answer to, or comment on things they don’t want to become involved in. This isn’t curiosity.
You don’t think that it may lead one off on tangents that take one away from their goal? I think it’s possible to get away from your goal, but that again isn’t because of curiosity. It’s from the compulsion to have all the details. Curiosity would just as much motivate you to see the outcome of bringing your goal to completion.
Having the details and also understanding how they fit together? Yes. That isn’t curiosity. It’s compulsion, but I have advice for getting a handle on that, if you want it. Indulge your information seeking behaviour more. If you seek all that information on your down time, it won’t get in the way of your goals. If you indulge it without frustrating yourself with bogus rules, you might come to find you do have a limit to how much information you actually want. But if you have rules about what you are allowed to know, well then the compulsion will likely stick around. It isn’t that getting information is bad, but you need to own your information craving and let it fit into all the other stuff you want to do.
I have a morbid fascination with the “stupid”, not because it makes me feel superior. Actually quite the opposite, it posses a challenge to my perception. The range of things that people can be curious about staggers me, so I will listen to “stupid” jokes and in a way they still amuse me, but not for the reason the teller thought they were funny.
Because it reflects their minds? Yes, and even simple and twisted minds fascinate me. Ants fascinate me too. I don’t want to sleep in an ant hill though, and I do want to limit how much stupidity I am immersed in at any one time. This sound egotistical?
I often deliberately pay attention to what a lot of people are calling stupid. If it gets their attention that much, I have to know what’s making so much of a stir, and often what I find is not so much genuine stupidity as a set of unpopular and thus challenging ideas. I gain a great deal from this. So the common sense that everybody likes so much, I like it too, but as an example of what not to believe or do, at least not automatically. What do you think, friends?
Reminds me of the child’s question of “Why?” That child is really on the ball.
The things I think are stupid seem so because to me they serve no constructive purpose or because I don’t understand them. Oh yes, but as they say, fore warned is fore armed. It can be very important to know the things that serve no constructive purpose, because someone else may find a purpose for them, often destructive. The line of thinking you consider complete idiocy might be the very thinking that lies behind all of our life’s biggest problems.
Like example; You might think it foolish to talk too much, and because you do you limit your speech. Another person might think it dishonest to be too quiet, think you secretive, so be suspicious of you despite your lack of deceit. You can gain very much from entertaining the ideas you don’t agree with.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~