Why is seeking, inquiring, and knocking on doors so crucial?

Why don’t possibilities appear more readily, answers offer themselves more speedily, and ways to move forward just neon-sign themselves for us?

Perhaps we’d be less than we really can be.

Perhaps there’s something in being curious which is about becoming Human.  It’s as though the journey is far more important for us than the destination.

We are born with the propensity for great curiosity.  Ken Robinson refers to this in his TED talk Changing Education Paradigms – viewed more than 1.3 million times.  Robinson refers to a longitudinal study on divergent thinking with a group of people.  They are almost all geniuses – 98% – and they are all kindergarten age.  Over the years of being retested, they lose their ability to think divergently.  (Robinson believes this to be result of our industrialised education.)

Curiosity leads us deeper, beyond knowing about something, to knowing something – and then to doing something about it.  It grows our thinking, our feeling, and our actions;  if everything came easier I’d wonder whether we could become deeper peoples: Human Becomings as my friend Alex McManus names our species.

Daniel Kahneman offers us something helpful to this when he refers to the illusion of familiarity: what we are first exposed to becomes most familiar and can lead to the shaping of our beliefs, impulses, choices, and actions.

Curiosity asks, What if there’s more?  What we think, what we feel, what we choose, and what we do could be wrong, or shallow?

The journey is everything, when we get to play real games which grow and develop our curiosity, making it possible for us to change, to become, even to become the difference we want to be for others.