CURIOSITY - A PRIMARY CURRENCY OF TRULY SHOWING UP

Curiosity is a primary currency of Truly Showing Up.  It applies across all activities, professional, social, familial. It carries us and contorts us to its craving.

Lady C’s currency runs hot. It sucks us into the present. “Meet me!” it commands. “Right here, right now. Fill the hole in my knowing. Appease and gratify me. Pronto.”

Madam C transmutes potential into pleasure, well before our prospects’ potential is met. “Will he offer the job? Buy my goods? Support my case?” She endlessly wonders. Madam C is our intellectual lust, chemically played.

Curiosity’s lust has three ingredients: Emotion, pulling us toward, itchy absence of knowing, distracting us, and impulse, fighting us. Deeply brewed, this pull-distract-urge is a worthy asset. She catalyzes interactions, be it with a work deliverable, hot date, family discussion or work-out. 

Much depends on what we’re seeking. As Ciserro explains, our “intrinsically motivated desire for information”, is self-satisfying. It’s lives “without lure of profit” beyond knowing. But Ciserro was in his head. In many a meeting my darling, there may very well be impending, highly pleasurable profit. Their forms are friendship, business opportunity, fun and folly.

Appended to her talents are curiosity’s dark side. Deviant, she is risk personified, paired with sharp appetite, fickle taste, and reckless tangents. “Look at that! I wonder what’s down there?” 

Discipline is not curiosity’s willing bedfellow. Sharp, yet whimsical, Madam C stabs us, then may leave us, halting discipline at the door. Yet discipline is a melody played through curiosity’s instruments. Harness her intellectual lust, and self-control ensues. 

Similarly, dismissing curiosity’s lure shuns discipline and arouses dullness. Even more, her dismissal entrains and practices the idle mind, listless body in tow. Discipline dispersed.

In a meeting or with a friend, curiosity and discipline intermittently harmonize and compete. Let’s focus here! both instruct. But look over there! she tugs. Her work can scratch our itch, bringing relief, or sustain concern when fear arrives. “Did you hear something?’

Madam C’s cognitive hunger has three edges. Her blades speak languages of Knowledge, Pleasure and Uncertainty. But often her gifts dominate her risks. Rewarded are we to love the wild ride. Listen and ask, “Go on...tell me more.” 

The choice is ours to harness and deploy her well. In doing so, we show up well.

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George Lowenstein, The Psychology of Curiosity, A Review and Reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, July 1994