Considering how curiosity affects a life

It was curiosity that got me out the door as a kid. It was also the only reason I ever cracked a book, and curiosity is the best teacher I've had.

I am happy to report that my special brand of curiosity is genetic, and I have passed it on to my son.

Gardening, jamming, drawing, reading, sports, cars, how electricity works, how houses are constructed, what life was like before he was born, my 5-year-old son finds it all fascinating. He wants to see everything this world offers, and I'm proud to be his tour guide.

I've come to think that the best thing I can do for him (beyond food and shelter) is to keep stoking his curiosity because if he stays curious, the rest will follow.

It sounds simple. But if dads are supposed to impart wisdom, how's this for a maxim?

“There are two kinds of people who enter bookstores: the ones who are curious and the ones who were brought there by the curious.”

It may not be the catchiest, and I have to admit this insight isn't even my own. It came from one of my closest friends.

There we were in the middle of a Barnes and Noble. I took too long. I always take too long in bookstores. First, I always hit the poetry section. Then I move to biographies, religion, travel, philosophy, art, history, politics, science….

I had just started on the periodicals when my clearly annoyed friend stepped into my path.

“How do you do it?” he said. 

He wanted to know where my curiosity came from. I had no idea. It was just my way. There was always something that I wanted to do, something I wanted to hunt down, know or experience.

This friend did better than I in school. He scored higher on tests and socially, he was generally a more agreeable fellow, at least according to girls at parties.

His question was a revelation for me and it ran even deeper for him. Talking about it further, my smart, likable friend - who could probably bench press me a couple of hundred times without breaking a sweat - said he would have traded all of this for my curiosity.

This is the special kind of curiosity that I now see in my son. It imbues our days with a sense of purpose (or from a 5-year-old's point of view, lots of mini-missions). That leads to cultivating hobbies, and these lead to desires that not only put a spring in our step, they keep us company through our days.

Getting back to my friend's question, how do I do it? It started with the first thing I loved - music. Thankfully, it just grabbed me. All I had to do from that moment on was keep moving.