curiosity

Curiosity. Have you ever watched a small child? He or she is curious about everything, naturally exploring the world. It can be alarming at times, to the adults as a small child tries to poke her fingers into an electrical socket or takes a mouthful of dirt and puts it in his mouth. It's all an exploration, and this great curiosity for life is really an essential attitude for our spiritual journey.

I use the word journey a lot for the spiritual part of life. However, it's also an exploration. It's as if we're penetrating a jungle for the first time, entering a land where no human has trod. We don't know what to expect. It might be exciting. It might be frightening. There might be things we've seen before. For sure, though, there will be things that we've never seen before and never even dreamt of. So this attitude of curiosity will encourage us to keep exploring.

In a way, the opposite of this curious attitude is habit. Once we've passed through that childhood period, it's all too easy to fall into a habitual way of being in the world.

A memory of a TV comic sketch has just popped into my mind. I guess it was Monty Python or something like that. And in this sketch, a businessman was heading off to his office job, dressed up in his suit, leaving his house in the morning. And everything he did was from habit. He walked to the newsagents and bought a newspaper. And it was such an automated behaviour that he didn't even notice that on this day, the person selling the newspaper, the woman working in the shop was stark naked. It didn't even register, though, because he wasn't living from curiosity, he didn't have his eyes open in that sense. He was living totally from habit.

It's a lazy way to be. And when we are lazy in that way, we don't notice what is around us. We're not really living in the world anymore. We're living in our memory, our expectation. And when we are living in this way from our memories and our expectations, living habitually, we are not present. We're not present with the moment. We're not present with what is actually around us, which is free forever new, even if only in some little detail, every moment is fresh, different from what has gone before.

And part of our spiritual journey is to take us evermore into a state of presence, presence with what actually is, in this moment. Curiosity will help take us there.

To help develop curiosity, it's useful to deliberately look around you, whenever you remember, remembering to be curious. Look around you and spot something, however small, that is new to you. And just really allow yourself to be absorbed by it, as if you are once again that small small child, not really knowing the world, but wanting to see it all, wanting to experience it all, directly for yourself, in this moment.

You might simply observe the colours of leaves. If someone were to ask you what colour are the leaves, ordinarily you might just say green. But really look at the leaves. There are so many different shades. And if we forget about the words for a moment, there's a whole palette here, of beautiful hues, to be enjoyed. Taking moments like this, to really see what is around you – and not just using sight, of course, the other senses too, the sounds, the smells, the taste in the mouth, whatever is touching you, to really spend a moment with the senses – having moments like this, from time to time throughout the day, will help this sense of curiosity to grow. It's there within us. It merely needs a little encouragement, a little nourishment. And once more, we will see the world through a child's eyes.