Curiosity is on my mind this week.
I remember as a child, whenever a question came up at the dinner table – about history, or science, or art, or just about anything that wasn’t “how was school today?” – my father would send me to the book-lined living room with the words “go look it up.” As a result, I fell in love with books, ideas, facts, trivia, and the very act of research, investigation, and learning itself. I suspect that when I was still little, he knew the answers, but as I got older, I’m fairly sure he didn’t, and so I somehow became Daddy’s Little Research Assistant.
Decades later, I still am in the habit of looking things up when a question arises. Of course, the information-age beacons of knowledge – Google, the Internet Movie Database, and Wikipedia, plus the powerful smart phones – make the research a bit easier, especially when finding the answer is in pursuit of having something quickly solved.
But I still delight in the long play… wandering the stacks in a library, browsing an encyclopedia, following a reference in one book to another, to another, to another. In search of something deeper, in search of answers to burning questions and the questions those questions lead to. And I still don’t have many answers, as much as I think I’ve read and researched and investigated over the years.
But therein lies the joy, and the meaning making.
How many times have you learned something and it connects to something you’ve seen, or thought of, or experienced? Perhaps it deepens the knowledge, or makes something clearer, or a new idea emerges from the confluence of information. When we explore knowledge, we uncover ideas that might inform us, help us, satisfy us, pique our interest, comfort us, and sometimes send us on new paths of discovery, wonder, and deepening.
I’ll be curious about what you uncover as you take time to explore and research the things that you are curious about.
Rev. Kimberley