🖼 TREE 319: Curiouser
One.
Remember in 2016 when David Bowie died and then the world turned upside down? It never stopped tumbling. People voted how they did and took to the streets or didn’t and took a vaccine or didn’t. And the way we talk about Those Other Folks devolved to easy words like selfish, stupid and evil.
There is a way back – for people who are willing to put in the work. The beginning of the way is open-hearted curiosity. Or if that’s too much to ask at first, enough of any kind of curiosity to ask why the hell…combined with the tenacity to keep asking until you get past the easy answers to the complexity and nuance and contradiction that make a human being.
The people who do the hard work of curiosity will restore their ability to disagree with an idea without demonising the person who holds it. They will regain the humility to improve their own ideas by integrating the wisdom of Those Other Folks. They will find it easier to love and harder to hate. They – we will help stop the tumbling in our spheres of influence.
Be aware: The people in charge of the power structures in your bubble don’t want you to be curious. Your curiosity threatens their ability to control you.
Two.
Take my new and Very Scientific personality test. Are you an Indifferent Toucan, a Determined Rabbit, a Curious Crane, a Disappointed Monkey or a Happy Holder. What you learn will revolutionise your life! (It won’t.)
Three.
There are so many good songs called Rabbit Hole! (Seriously, do a song search on Spotify and press play). I chose this one because I almost never give you any hard rock.
Two of my life-changing moments of curiosity:
When I was a teenager, my mom read a biography of Nelson Mandela. She passed it on to me. When I read that Mandela, one of the greatest good guys of the modern world, was a socialist and started out in politics as a communist, it blew my young Republican mind wide open.
in the early 2000s. My wife Christine got book from the library by makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin. In the conservative Evangelical American culture that I grew up in, a gay man doing makeup for supermodels and actors was definitely the enemy. The story of his struggle, the warmth with which he wrote about human beings like Naomi Campbell and Madonna destroyed my ability to see people as 2D targets for their enemies to shoot at.
Read books.
Men, listen to women in your life.
Grow slowly
Jeff
Wonder if Matt read all the way to the bottom today. I will have to quiz him later. HAH!
The world has seemed to slam their hearts closed, and dig their heels in. Refusing to move on their beliefs or their (seemingly unproven) theories. In a generation where my parents highly encouraged college and higher education, I can’t comprehend how this has happened.
The desire to learn and to seek education within fields, and on topics that interest you automatically opens your mind and your heart to understanding in order to grasp the concepts you’re pursuing. That desire to deepen our knowledge and be edified isn’t embedded in everyone as it is those that we surround ourselves with.
Such an important reminder. Curiosity always shines a light in the darkness.