Curiosity
Oakland, CA 29 September 2001
The last entry for this journal. I feel a subtle pressure to make this one exceptional. It is an urge I must resist. This is my next entry, or more accurately, my current entry. I have written before about “becoming current with myself”. It feels that I am there now. I have a clear sense of who I am, as well as what I want in my life, and how I want this life to unfold. No small accomplishment.
The terrible ache from missing A is gone now, or at least gone for now. I am keenly aware of this wavelike quality to grief, and, no doubt, that ache will return now and again. In its place now is a deep curiosity. A wonder about how it will all turn out. A wonder about why this is all so difficult for her. This is a surprising word – curious. I wouldn’t have expected this word to emerge from the ache of missing her. Curiosus means “full of care”. It comes from cura, which itself means “care”. This is the same root word for cure.
If I have looked at this word curiosity before I have forgotten it, but it is precisely the right word for how I am feeling now. I am full to overflowing with care for her. As I am full of care for myself in this moment. To be truly curious is to plumb the depths with great care, with the full awareness that tremendous harm can be done because of inattention or carelessness. To be deeply curious also means that I hold the intention to be a healing force in all this. This kind of curiosity is not about a goal, or arriving at some desired destination. It is about sitting with the feeling of caring and holding a question without trying to answer it.
Now for the first time I am beginning to see the power, or the creative tension, that is embedded in some of my questions – What do you want? What would happen if you were to get what you want? To be deeply curious about these questions means to be open to all possibilities. Otherwise they become either subtle, or not so subtle, manipulations.
I also believe now that this practice of curiosity that I embarked on with these Morning Pages has had a curative effect on me as well. And I notice that I am not second-guessing myself either. In this one area of my life, in the practice of self-inquiry, I have felt over time a deep caring and a kind of self-curing, a self-healing. This has allowed me, maybe for the first time in my life, to know what is true for me and know that, no matter how deeply I plumb, that same truth remains. It is as if there is an unbreakable thread anchored by my heart that remains fixed and centered regardless how events on the surface clang about, regardless how the storms on the surface may buffet me to and fro. On the deeper level of caring there also emerges that deeper kind of knowing. It is a knowing that can only emerge from deep, abiding, unshakeable love.
Deep, profound and authentic curiosity is the path to a loving relationship. I guess in a way I have always known this, but now for the first time I am able to articulate it in a way that allows me to drop my shoulders and sink into my breathing. I can now begin to notice how much there is to be curious about within me and around me. Not how will this, or anything else, “turn out”. Not how will I, or anyone else, “turn out”. Rather it is this, right now, what is true right now? This is real care; this is real curiosity.