"Unimaginable... But I want them to try."

How an unexpected discovery helped me find the metaphorical front door again.

While unpacking from our recent move, a little box caught my attention. I peeked inside and found it filled with post-it notes and scraps of paper that I’d stashed away over the years. In true procrastinator fashion, I ceased unpacking immediately, settled myself on the floor, and began sorting through a borderline eccentric number of chicken-scratchings. Many were swiftly relegated to the trash pile, but there was one in particular that made me pause. It was a pale blue post-it note that read: 

“Loss and pain is unimaginable in the world… But I want them to try.”

Below the quote I had scribbled: (re the news/society/kids)

I wish I’d also added who said this, but I vaguely recall it was from a podcast interview I listened to years ago. The precise details remain fuzzy, but the man was, I think, somehow related to the journalism world, and the gist of the question he’d been asked was how he approached raising his kids in a world where much of the news was difficult for even adults to make sense of at times. 

The quote struck a chord with me back then, and it resonated just as deeply when I came across it a few weeks ago. The second part — “But I want them to try” — is a beautifully succinct and gentle way of reminding us that, as humans in this world, we each have a very real responsibility to the rest of humanity. A responsibility to engage with the truths of our world when we encounter them — the good, the bad, the desperately uncomfortable. Whether those encounters are in-person, in the news, or via the myriad other ways we experience life, not trying to understand is simply not human. 

I can’t remember a time when I haven’t felt this to my core. And I’ve long considered it a foundational underpinning of society — part of a social contract we all tacitly agree to in exchange for partaking in, and often benefitting from, a globalized world.

Which is why I’ve found myself frustrated over the years as I increasingly hear people saying that the world is too depressing to keep reading about, or too complex to try to understand. My brow furrows in concern when I hear entire populations of people being dismissed after catastrophic news events because their country is used to bad things happening, and their people are inherently resilient, so it’s actually fine. I can’t help but feel that these sentiments — this act of not even trying to understand what life is like for others — are an abdication of our responsibility as humans, and a breakdown of the social contract I’ve long believed in.

But then I had a conversation with my husband and, just as I geared up for a long preach to the choir, ready to extoll the wisdom of the words I’d unearthed on the post-it, he rendered me silent within seconds. All he had to say was, “You’re assuming people still subscribe to that social contract. That’s not a given.”

Oh.

It was a devastatingly obvious observation. One that I hadn’t even stopped to consider because of how engrained this belief is in me. But of course, he was right. (I won’t say that too loudly since he’s within earshot.)

At this point I can hear someone shouting from the back of the room, “But what does all of this have to do with curiosity?” It’s a fair question. And the simple answer is, “Everything!”

That’s because, regardless of whether people still subscribe to this particular social contract or not, any form of turning a blind eye, turning a page, truncating a conversation, or scrolling past a headline, is an active stifling of our curiosity — it’s a missed opportunity to expand our knowledge, build connections, or even learn something new about ourselves. After all, rejection and avoidance are two separate things — actively rejecting something as uninteresting to us is an entirely valid thing to do; just as long as we pay attention to our reasons for that rejection.

And sure, we all put blinders on at times, and that’s normal. What’s important to recognize, however, is that these avoidance tactics are commonly used to consciously, or unconsciously, sidestep something we don’t want to think about — a sort of coping mechanism to protect us from feeling uncomfortable about a given topic. 

When these coping mechanisms are engaged regularly, and this suppression of our curiosity becomes a repeated, default response to anything that doesn’t fall under the worryingly trendy category of good vibes only, then it becomes something akin to willful ignorance. This specific type of incurious, willful ignorance is something that I see more often than is comfortable, and it occupies my thoughts regularly, if I’m honest. (So does my cat, though, to be fair — pinch of salt, and whatnot.)

If I had to guess why the notion of willful ignorance captures my attention, then I think the answer would lie somewhere in the fact that it took me until my thirties to be comfortable with my own curiosity. (I’ve written more about that here if you missed it previously.) After decades of fearing my own curiosity, the idea that people might actively choose to repress theirs is difficult for me to wrap my head around. 

And so, when I read the quote on that little piece of paper, and absorbed the quiet weight of his words — his implied concern that not trying had even become an option — it transported me back to some of my earliest questions when I contemplated starting the Curious Ones: Do people know they’re cutting themselves off from their curiosity? Is it intentional? Is it accidental? Have they considered the implications?

And that’s when it hit me — I’ve been approaching the Curious Ones through the back door because, maybe, I was a little bit too nervous to go through the front door. If I put my aims into words, I thought, then maybe nobody will care. If I say out loud that I want people to try to imagine the unimaginable, and I want them to try to understand that letting our collective, societal curiosity atrophy will negatively impact the world around us, then maybe, I feared, I’ll end up feeling as dejected as the mystery quoter sounded in his interview. These are real possibilities, and I accept that now. The mild fear of rejection isn’t reason enough to keep going through the back door, though. 

By eschewing my direct message, I inadvertently created an elephant in the room that only I could see. He became enormous, and multicolored, and would sit on my hands when I tried to type a new post. My message had become muddled, and coming across the quote helped me realize that the elephant wasn’t going to go away until I un-muddled things.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. I may not have the answers to my questions, and maybe I won’t find them — and maybe I’m the only one who cares about searching for the answers in the first place! But the most certain way to never get any closer to answers is by continuing not to talk. So let’s talk about it — let’s talk about the absolutely fundamental concern that society’s relationship with curiosity is in decline, and it’s affecting everything around us.

Curiosity has the unique ability to offer us endless entry points into exploring the world we live in, and understanding our fellow humans. There’s no reason for incurious, willful ignorance to be flourishing, which is why the Curious Ones aims to give readers fresh opportunities to engage with our world, and with the cultures and individuals that often get overlooked or explained away.

As the mystery quoter said, so much of what happens in our world is unimaginable. But I hope that something you read on the Curious Ones will spark your curiosity, and you’ll want to try.