Remember in 2016 when David Bowie died and then the world turned upside down?1 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 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.
Do you know about Fat Dog yet?
Grow slowly
Jeff
It’s not like 2016 was the first time in recent history that the world turned upside down, but geez that was a heckuva year.
I do remember Bowie’s last year, last CD. It was depressing. Everything else he did, I loved. A friend gave me Ziggy Stardust then I saw Bowie’s concert. I related to him, fashion, beat, dance. He made me very curious and changed my life. Curiosity is marvelous exploration🪷
Man I remember how big of a deal we made out of the atrocities of 2016. And then 2020 came along, “hold my beer.” An even weirder exercise is to wonder what The Other Side would uncover if they got curious enough to look past our own political stereotypes. Are we solid under there or are we hiding something under the sheen of our political label?