Day 15 Reflection: Curiosity

I've always had an uneasy relationship with my curiosity. 

This probably has to do with the fact that, at the age of seven, I got caught going through the drawers of a buffet at my friend's house. I wanted to know if all buffets were catchalls for stuff like the one at my house, and what kind of clutter my friends's parents collected. I seriously didn't know I did anything wrong. (That was a lot of my childhood, getting yelled at for things I had never been told were wrong.)

As a adult, I'm still very curious. Most of the time I save my curiosity for the most appropriate things, like research: "How much debt do college students have? How do they feel about it?" Or writing: "What would Luke Dunstan do in this situation?"

But then there's the rubbernecking at accidents. The burning desire to ask personal questions. The gleaning of details on the Internet about teens dying of suicide and celebrity nervous breakdowns and the manifesto of the New Zealand shooter. I am not proud of myself for these, because with each click on such articles, I vote for privacy to be invaded and websites to post hate.

I suspect that curiosity is hardwired in the brain as a mechanism to protect one from harm -- if I know what caused the accident, I will avoid the same fate. If I know the motivation of the mass murderer, I will spot the next one before he attacks. The truth of the matter, though, is that fate is capricious enough that no amount of information can guarantee safety. So I keep the personal questions at a minimum and only to the people closest to me, and I drive on when I see the accident.

Curiosity, they say, killed the cat -- but satisfaction brought it back. Sometimes we never get satisfaction, and that's okay as long as we don't try to get it at any cost.