Curiosity is a good vibe in the face of the uncertain.
— Martin Baker
This blog post was inspired by a recent conversation with a friend who was feeling uncertain about a meeting she needed to arrange. After listening for a while, I suggested she approached it with a sense of curiosity. “Imagine you’re visiting a volcano,” I said. “You don’t know what will happen when you get there but you’re curious to find out.” It wasn’t a perfect analogy, but my friend got the meaning. (The conversation reminded me of another natural wonder analogy which Fran and I still use: that of visiting a waterfall and standing back so as not to be drenched or overwhelmed.)
When Is Curiosity Useful?
Curiosity might not be the most obvious response to a difficult or stressful situation, but Fran and I have found it helpful in a number of scenarios.
- Moving or anticipating the move from one phase of illness to another. For example from mania to depression, or from relative stability into depression or mania.
- Starting a new medication, changing dosage, or tapering off a medication. (All under medical supervision).
- Changing medical practitioner, for example when a professional retires or moves away.
- When concerned about other people’s ill health or financial situation. For example friends or family members.
The common factor in these situations, and the primary reason for our anxiety or distress, is the uncertainty about what will happen.
Curiosity and Catastrophising
When things are uncertain, it’s easy to catastrophise. Our brains tend to jump to the worst outcome we can imagine. As Fran puts it, “catastrophising is a well-worn path.” To some degree, it’s a protective instinct. By imagining the worst possible outcome, we feel we’re prepared for whatever happens. Then, if things don’t work out that bad, we can feel relieved. There’s a certain logic to this, but it’s not the healthiest approach to the uncertainties of life. There will always be things in our future that we can anticipate but not predict with any degree of accuracy. Living in a perpetual worst case scenario is exhausting at best, and profoundly unhealthy at worst.
There is a variant of this mindset that Fran’s prone to. Rather than contemplating the worst possible outcome for a given situation, she’ll come up with multiple “bad case scenarios” — each in its way awful to contemplate. I remind her that although it can help to think through alternate futures, only one future will, in fact, play out.
Letting Go of Expectations
Approaching life with curiosity allows us to take a step back and observe external events and our responses to them with compassion, humility, and even a little humour. So much of our response to life arises from the uneasy dynamic between our fear of what might happen and our expectations about what should. Between what we hope we’ve earned and what we fear we deserve.
Letting go of expectation, of anticipation, of needing to know what’s going to happen before it happens, can be profoundly liberating. It’s not a case of pushing our worries down, ignoring legitimate concerns, or failing to prepare. Curiosity allows us to move forward and respond appropriately to things as they unfold, learning as we go.
Curiosity doesn’t guarantee that bad things won’t happen. Rather, it accepts problems and disappointments for what they are, encouraging us to face the reality of them and move through them to the other side. As American TV host, comedian, and actor Conan O’Brien observed, “There’s nothing more empowering than your worst fear coming true, and realizing you are still okay.”
Why Does Curiosity Get Such a Bad Rap?
The familiar proverb “curiosity killed the cat” might be taken as a warning, but there’s more to the maxim than might appear at first sight. In its original form, what killed the poor feline wasn’t curiosity but care, in the sense of worrying or feeling sorrow for others. Budding Shakespearean scholars will recognise the following excerpt from Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1599).
What, courage man! What though care killed a cat, thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill care.
Although there’s no mention of cats in our book High Tide Low Tide, Fran and I recognise how toxic worrying can be, both to the person worrying and the person being worried about. Don’t worry about me, care about me remains a central tenets of our mutually supportive friendship. The idea that curiosity has the potential to cause cats’ (or at least one cat’s) demise developed later. “They say curiosity killed a cat once” appears in an Irish newspaper of 1868. One alleged feline fatality, sad though it undoubtedly would be, hardly justifies the bad reputation curiosity has attracted over the years.
Was Schrödinger Curious About His Cat?
Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment about the logical abusurdities of quantum physics, suggested in 1935 by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Simply expressed, he said that if you placed a cat and something that could kill the cat (for example a capsule of poison triggered by the decay of a radioactive atom) in a sealed box, you wouldn’t know for certain if the cat were dead or alive until you opened the box to look. Weirdly (according to the then prevailing Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics) until the box was opened, the cat would be both dead and alive. In this — hypothetical — scenario, the observer’s curiosity can be taken as either fatal or life-affirming with respect to the cat.
This yes-or-no, is-it-or-isn’t-it perspective is one I’ve experienced several times. It’s more than “I don’t know what’s happened.” It’s more the conviction that either/both scenarios are objectively true until I open the box to look. I described this with respect to the sold / unsold status of my childhood home in Schrödinger’s Fishing Tackle Box.
Unless or until I asked the house, my home from birth until the age of eighteen when I left for university, was simultaneously sold — and not. Curiosity may have killed the cat but Erwin Schrödinger’s feline remains alive and not-alive until someone looks inside the box and the entangled, quantum superposition states of live cat / dead cat collapse.
The blog post’s title refers to a wooden tackle box my father made for me when I was in my teens. I couldn’t remember if I’d rescued it from the house at some point when my mother still lived there. If so, it was safe, somewhere in my own home. If not, it was gone, disposed of along with everything else other people had deemed unworthy of preserving or passing on. Curiosity doesn’t have to mean actively going after the truth. It can mean being at peace with not knowing things for certain. I was content not knowing for sure about my tackle box. I still am. As I wrote, “It exists / notexists. Like so much else. And I find I am okay with that. With the unknowningness.”
Curiosity and the New Year
It’s a long time since I shackled myself with New Year resolutions. For a few years I shared lists of “Things I’d like to do in the next twelve months” but I stopped after the pandemic of 2020. That year reminded me how futile our expectations are in a universe that pays no heed to what we want or imagine we deserve. At the start of a new year, I’m making no predictions and have few expectations. I enter 2025 curious as to what it will bring, confident I’ll handle what happens as and when it does. In doing so, I’m in good company. Albert Einstein famously declared, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”
I’ll close with an excerpt from a recent conversation with my friend Jen who asked what I was planning to write about next. I told her I had an idea for a piece about curiosity.
M: I think curiosity is a great way to approach things, but I’ve never actually written about it before, I don’t think.
J: Yeah. It’s good to be curious.
M: So we’ll have to see how this piece works out. I’m curious to find out.
J: Hee hee.
Photo of feral cats at Puerto Morgan, Gran Canaria, by Paul Longhurst at Unsplash.
No cats — feral, quantum, or otherwise — were harmed in the making of this blog post.
