Curiosity may have killed the cat, but I think the real question is this: how many more lives were saved from complete and utter boredom by an inclination for inquisitiveness?
Use any Thesaurus and a search for “curiosity” will likely return overwhelmingly negative results: nosiness, snooping, prying and the like.
When did we decide to stamp out anything resembling wonder in favor of a decidedly more tedious existence? The answer to this question may very well require us to revisit the time in our lives before we hit the elementary school sandpits and high school hallways.
Yep, you guessed it! We’re taking a trip back to the glory days of childhood.
To help explain how curiosity lies in the heart of every adventurer, I found myself looking to young children for models. Before we had professors, managers and mentors telling us what to know and how to learn it, we relied on our powers of observation to get us through each day. We used our senses to learn about our surroundings and then tried to synthesize connections and distinguish patterns for the sake of discovery, not so we could ace an exam. Then came the excitement of our first day of Kindergarten and it was all downhill from there; the realization that memorization pulls rank on “why” slowly set in and we’ve been working for the weekend ever since.
As the semester begins to wrap up, let’s leave a little breathing room for our senses. If you’ve never considered yourself bold or adventurous, here’s your chance. While you go through the mind-numbing task of swallowing four months worth of Organic Chemistry, Foreign Policy and British Literature only to regurgitate it in a few weeks, buck tradition taking a minute to be mesmerized by something. Anything. If you have to walk out of the library to do it, well, all the better. :)