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In my first semester at UCLA, I was lucky enough to be placed with a screenwriting instructor who gave me back my favourite creative tool. I think I misplaced it somewhere around adolescence and replaced it with a fearful hunt for perfectionism or achieving an ever elusive-endgame that would allow me to stop hunting altogether. Curiosity doesn’t want an end game. Its very survival depends on our desire and willingness to not know and to never feel like we’ve reached the end of anything.
Those workshops were not courtrooms with my classmates in the roles of judge and jury, there to condemn me to either being innocent (I wrote a good scene or a good first draft), or guilty (I didn’t). Instead, they ran more like a fun ‘Who done it?’ Missing elements in our work were treated with curiosity. We know something went wrong here but we’re not sure what it was. Now it’s a fun game to figure it out. A puzzle of sorts. Not an exercise in shame and applause. Success and failure. More like a treasure hunt. It generated an atmosphere of possibility and optimism. It gave me back my curious mind, which then led me back to the idea that the fun truly was in the journey, not the destination. Writing the screenplay became a game of solving a mystery. Once we’d solved it the game was over.
As adults, we like to dress it up and call ourselves ‘Seekers’. As children, we don’t need grandiose titles for our innate urges. We call it ‘What does this button do?’ or ‘Why is the sky blue?’, ‘What happens when I put my sandwich in the VCR?’ or ‘What would happen if I tried finger painting on Daddy’s car with the paint he’s using on the house?’ (True story). We are curious about everything.
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When we stop being curious, it has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? In my experience, that which is denied goes into shadow and becomes a dark and twisted version of what it once was.
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I was thinking when writing about cynicism, about just how dangerous it is for us to live with this aspect of ourselves repressed. When we stop being curious, it has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? In my experience, that which is denied goes into shadow and becomes a dark and twisted version of what it once was. Maybe it starts with social etiquette or being polite. As children, we routinely mortify our parents by publicly asking questions and making observations about what we see. Our poor parents, in an attempt to raise us as socially adjusted humans, tell us to shhhh. Or to stop staring. Please God, stop pointing. But if those curiosities go unacknowledged, then they go into the dark. “How did you come to believe that?” asked from a place of genuine curiosity, becomes a shaming, accusatory “How did you come to believe that?” with an air of condescension. Or we don’t even bother asking because, in our quest for safety, we develop the notion that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and so if we don’t see our beliefs mirrored back to us, we just think, wrong. The naturally investigative part of us doesn’t even get a chance to surface because it has been so buried beneath fear and the need for a truth we can cling to for the rest of our lives so that we can have rules to live by that make us feel safe. We don’t want there to be any questions, not about the big stuff anyway. Questions imply that we don’t know. When curiosity has been repressed, “I don’t know” stops being exciting and instead becomes a threat.
I want to call curiosity a mentality of absolute faith. It says to me, it is safe to not know, to have endless questions, to constantly wonder, and to explore new terrain. Whenever you need an answer, one will show up. With a curious mind, life reemerges as an adventure, a mystery, and we can learn to tolerate the suspense as we once did, with wonder.
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A version of this post was originally published on NataliePeatfield.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
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