A starfish doesn’t have a brain but can flip its stomach inside out. All polar bears are left handed, the octopus’s pupil is a rectangle, woman blink twice as much as men, Saturn would float in water, and a duck’s quack doesn’t echo and no one knows why. These things inspire me. They convince me every day that the world is a strange, fantastic place and that giving into normality, habit, and acceptance, is simply denying a world whose majesty we have only begun to grasp.
These questions, mysteries, and problems, instill the world with enchantment. Not just because they open up an odd and puzzling riddle but because they make me yearn to see them, hear them, and leave me to imagine them.
Curiosity means that something moves you to question, to appreciate and wonder rather than accept. Too often people settle their lives and dreams for a world they soon find predictable. Curiosity is important if only because it motivates us past settling.
Sam Keen once said that “To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.” The poet Rainer Marie Rikle said “…Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.”
Soren Kierkegaard quoted Lessing as saying “If god held all truth in his right hand and in his left hand the life long pursuit of it, he [Lessing] would choose the left.” I want to achieve a life discovering ideas and experiences that can give me even a small understanding of the world.
When thinking about what will drive my life in the years to come I can only hope that in hard times I will still embrace the values I held in better times. I hope that my life will find purpose in pursing rather than expecting, in questioning rather than complying. I hope that inspiration will still come from unexpected and astonishing sources.
My life purpose is to find and love the questions that will inspire me to look at the world in a new way.