Thinking Outside The Box

When Sir Isaac Newton noticed that apples don’t fall up, he discovered gravity. When I was 4-years-old and stuck a scissor into an electrical outlet, I discovered that electricity doesn’t like scissors. I never did that again, but also never lost my inquisitive nature.

Dorothy Parker said, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Maybe there is no cure, but there are plenty of people around whose mission, it seems, is to squash it.

Young children have an insatiable appetite for wanting to know things. That’s why their favorite word is; “Why?” And, of course, once they get an answer, it only raises other questions. A parental, “Because I said so!” is never satisfying, and only re-enforces the notion that parents are really dumb---which usually lasts until children are parents themselves.

My son, Josh was never a destructive toddler, but his curiosity often involved touching things better left alone, such as a huge Buddha made out of butter at a fancy restaurant. It only took a little poke from a tiny finger to give Buddha a second belly button. I couldn’t prove that Buddha didn’t have two belly buttons before we came, and Josh was wearing his innocent face, but as Steven Wright said, “Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect.”

When Josh grew to manhood he discovered in graduate school that prodding and prying is called research.

Curiosity is tricky. It pushes us to achieve, but can hold us back because sometimes we are so curious that we keep searching and don’t carry through. That is called procrastination. Steven King said it well; “The scholars greatest weakness is calling procrastination research.” Albert Einstein was modest when he said, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” And look where that got him.

I recently read that the Chinese are not good at innovation and creativity. Not so surprising! Being curious and questioning in a repressive society can land you in jail.

Solving any mystery starts with curiosity---trying to put a puzzle together to see how the pieces fit. It’s not surprising that the one-ton space lab that landed on Mars is called, Curiosity. The landing could not be tested from start to finish because NASA scientists couldn’t simulate all conditions on Mars.

I get it! But why wasn’t anyone curious about all those apples that don’t fall up, until Isaac Newton was in1687? They were probably just too busy eating them, and not curious about them at all. After all, they were just apples

Esther Blumenfeld (What if? Why? What Now? What matters? and Where do we go from here?)