One More Perspective

Today, I had what has long been an elusive emotion.  It was fleeting, but definite.  It felt nice, it felt energizing.  It’s as if I stepped out of the heaviness of the last years and for a moment, just a moment, I was simply a person again, wondering about the possibilities of life ahead instead of self-loathing.  I haven’t experienced that in a very long time. 

Curiosity requires suspending a lot of comfortable and consuming emotions, especially the dark ones.  It invites us to be open, to seek.  Maybe youth is simply curiosity without debilitating self-narratives just yet (and damaged joints).  Maybe curiosity is the breath of fresh air our souls need to find meaning again, beauty and the small joys that string together a life worth living, despite what came before and what we, with years of experience, know is life’s inevitable messiness.  I don’t know, but I’m grateful it broke through for a moment. 

I read not too long ago neuroscience shows that gratitude and anxiety run on opposing neural circuits.  The brain’s threat centers quiet down when our prefrontal pathways for gratitude light up.  Could curiosity work the same way?  By turning the unknown into an invitation instead of a threat, curiosity suspends rash judgment and allows the potential for something new to reveal itself.  There’s expansion in that.  Maybe even healing. 

Curiosity is essentially self-forgetting. It doesn’t ask who I am in relation to the world; it simply asks what the world is doing.  In that posture, the personal story drops out of the equation because there is nothing to defend, prove, or atone for.  Curiosity allows me to remember I am not my history, my accumulated fatigue, or the roles I have carried.  I get to simply be the quiet awareness leaning forward to see what happens next, without grasping, expectations or attachments to specific outcomes.  That isn’t just relief; it’s the beginning of room to breathe.