I have a lot of curiosity about a lot of things, probably because my brain jumps from one thing to another in a heartbeat. Just this very question has me popping all over the place in the range of things it is throwing at me that I am curious about. Below, I have picked out a few of them.
The first thing that popped into my head is the fact that I am often curious about how things work. So, how does it work that I flip a switch and the lights come on, or I pick up an old-fashioned phone, dial a number and am connected to someone I want to speak to even if they’re on the other side of the world – I find that more curious than I do how a mobile phone works because I kind of get that with satellites etc. I am curious because I often wonder how something comes together? Why does it come together? What made the person who invented it think it could come together? I mean, if you lived in the era of the candle lighting your room, what on earth made you think of something like an electric bulb? What made the people who investigated electricity – from the ancients to the nineteenth century – look into it? I guess it was curiosity as to why (for the ancients) an electric fish gave off such a charge. I don’t know, but it’s fascinating…and look what it has meant in terms of technological advancements in the world. From the wheel to electricity, one thing happens and BAM! civilisation is altered unutterably from thereon in. It’s just fascinating.
I am also very curious about what motivates people to do some of the things they do from the truly evil to the truly heroic. Who doesn’t wonder what motivated monsters like Hitler and Stalin? Perhaps we want to understand to reassure ourselves we would never think in that way, but there is for me a curiosity in wondering…why? Just why would anyone do such a thing? And why would all those other people carry out such unspeakable crimes? I studied the Holocaust at length in my degree, and the subject of my thesis was an attempt to understand why seemingly ordinary Germans carried out the mass murder of Jews who they had rounded up in tiny villages in Poland. It was…incomprehensible what they did. I tried to assign some reasons on the basis that I don’t believe any group of people carry out the same action for the same reasons because they are individual personalities. But, for me, it was still unfathomable why anyone would think what they were being asked to do was remotely okay. It’s not dissimilar to some of the things we are hearing from the US about the ICE agents just grabbing random people – who are not illegal immigrants – and transporting them elsewhere. Why? Just, why? I feel the same when I think about the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, who rounded up, accused, and tortured women for witchcraft before imprisoning them, finding them guilty and if prison life or torture didn’t kill them, had them hung for the ‘crime’. Though I suspect his motives were quite clear (financial) there are much easier ways of achieving them than the way he chose. What on earth went through his mind?
Equally, people who complete heroic acts to save the lives of sometimes complete strangers at the expense of their own I am curious about. What invokes that level of heroism? How do you make that choice and stick with it even when you know what it means for you? It’s in equal measure beautiful and tragic that a teacher will put themself between a gunman and their students. A man put his life on the line in London when a terrorist started randomly stabbing people at a conference – he confronted him, unarmed, before others could help and stopped more people from being killed. The secret agents in World War Two who knew they were putting their lives on the line by going into enemy territory but they did it time and again for the greater good. What is the thought process they go through? For some, in the immediacy of a situation it is clearly the parasympathetic nervous system with its fight, flight or freeze, but for many people they’re not in that urgent position when they make a decision that risks their lives. And yet, they still do it. It’s utterly fascinating to me, the motivating factors behind people’s actions.
I am also curious – very curious – about the universe I think because I cannot comprehend what it looks like, and it hasn’t really been depicted anywhere. No one has decided yet to make a scale representation so I can’t figure out, for example, where the Pillars of Creation are in relation to the Milky Way. And the fact that everything we see is history, so the Pillars of Creation may not even be there anymore because the images we have are based on history just…blows my mind. I don’t quite have a grip on the Milky Way either, what it would look like if it was mapped out and yet it is something we are a part of. But then, it was only recently that I saw an image which mapped not just the planets in our solar system but also all the moons and dwarf planets and meteors that are swimming around…I mean, space is packed. It isn’t this vast, empty space it is full of things that are charged with energy and have some form of activity on them. The planets all have a weather system for example – isn’t it Jupiter that has a storm that’s been raging for hundreds of thousands of years? These planets aren’t static rocks circling the sun, they are full of activity from nature…we just think the earth is the only real one because it has lifeforms on it and the others apparently don’t. But they aren’t dead, the planets are very much alive in their own way.
Quantum physics and astrophysics are subjects I am very curious about. I don’t begin to understand them, but I am very curious about them possibly because they are very far from static. What once were apparent ‘knowns’ are debunked further down the line which is something I love. When watching programmes on TV about the universe, I do chuckle to myself when someone says ‘we used to think x but that proved to be inaccurate, but now we know it’s y’ and I look forward to the programme that says ‘we used to think y but that proved to be wrong, but now we know it’s z’ because you just know it’s going to happen. The fact that it is so completely unknown, really, is what fascinates me. That we are intrinsically part of something we don’t truly begin to understand, are completely dominated by, and the more we discover the more we seem to move closer to spirituality…I just love it. Ever since I was a child, I have loved looking up at the skies and just marvelling at it while also feeling millions of unanswerable questions running through my mind about it.
I am, and have always been, a very curious person. I know I must have driven everyone insane as a child with my constant ‘why’ response to answers because my son’s habit of doing so is exhausting. And, apparently, his insatiable curiosity is karma for mine! But I think to be curious is to love life and all its marvellous complications. The day I stop being curious is probably the day it’s best for me to call it quits.
Louisa Simpson 