In search of Curiosity

The habit we all must nurture!

Of late I have been feeling a little stuck.

Stuck in what I now refer to as ‘rat-brain-mode’, whereby my craving for a constant stream of dopamine hits has me hooked to my digital devices like I’m on life support. Perhaps you know this feeling all-too-well yourself? I mean, trauma specialist and physicist, Gabor Mate, says we’re all addicts now, in some way or another, and a low-level technology addiction seems par for the course of surviving and (faux)thriving in today’s tech-addled world.

You know you’re deep in it when you find yourself reaching continuously, relentlessly, unendingly for your phone just so you can open every and any app in search of your next hit. Notifications, updates, likes, messages, emails, roses… personally, I’m greedy for them all.

(See, I just did it again while writing this. I opened up my emails even though I didn’t want to read an email, then reached for my phone to check watsapp.)

There are many problems with being stuck in a loop of notification-hunting, but chief amongst them, I’ve found, is a paralysis of curiosity. How can your mind stay curious and hungry for new and better information, while fixated on where it’s going to get that next (dopamine) fix?

The cacophony of pings and alerts that emanate from whatever collection of digital devices permanently litter our every vicinity threaten always to drown out the stream of questions that might otherwise form in relation to a new environment, a distant sound, a stranger walking past us. Distracted by a phone, by social media, we invariably become less perceptive of the world around us, and less questioning about what we’re seeing, hearing, smelling...

While contemplating what has of late felt like a severe absence of curiosity in my ordinarily insatiably curious mind, something writer Malcom Gladwell said to Steven Bartlett on A Diary of a CEO floated into my brain, like a lifeboat revealing itself amidst tempestuous waters.

“I think of curiosity as a habit, not a trait,” he noted.

“By that distinction I mean people are not naturally curious or not naturally curious, there are people who have cultivated the habit of curiosity and those who have let it lie fallow.”

Cultivating a habit of writing daily, he went one, is one such way of nurturing curiosity, since it forces you to look up and out as you search for things about which to write.

“All successfully curious people do that in one form or another,” he concluded.

As Gladwell observes, the process of writing forces whoever is holding pen to paper, fingertip to keyboard, to search actively for points of interest, to find beauty and intrigue in what might otherwise feel like the mundane, and to probe and question that which they might otherwise take for granted - the sun as it sets, the moon as it shines, the woman as she runs hurriedly past, but to where? Why?

As author Joan Didion noted in an NY Times essay: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” She wrote novels to answer questions, and in asking questions she stayed curious.

*Me reading in a cafe all weekend getting unstuck

But giving our minds the time and space they need to grow hungry means lingering at the precipice of boredom, of staying a while longer just at the moment at which you reach, intuitively, for distraction. It’s uncomfortable to sit still, but it’s in stillness that our thoughts might just wander long enough to develop into ideas, ideas into questions, questions into the driving urge to write the novel.

While interviewing bestselling author, Coco Mellors, recently, about her new book ‘Blue Sisters’, she recounted one of the most significant pieces of advice imparted on her by a former writing teacher.

. And that was the ‘three hour block’.

That’s three hours of no Wifi, your phone locked away in a drawer you can’t reach, and no other distractions.

“It’s like marathon-training,” Mellors told me. “There was a time where I could do that so easily. And now, since having a baby, three hours might as well be three days. After just a few minutes I’m clawing at the walls, desperate to get out of myself because so much of writing is confronting failure, the failure of thought-to-thing, and staying with it anyway, which is difficult.”

“But Nathan (my writing teacher),” she continued, “used to say ‘it’s the 27th second that’s the moment of genius. You have to be able to stay through from one to twenty-seven, because if you tap out and check your phone, or call someone, or go and make dinner at second 26, then you're not going to get there.”

And that’s the worrying thing, isn’t it? That our social media addicted minds are perennially distracted by the allure of the bright screen and flashing notification-lights so that we seldom sit alone long enough with thoughts for said thoughts to evolve into anything deeper and more profound.

“So many moments of genius come from being able to sit through the 27 seconds of discomfort, Mellors concluded. “But if we can't do that anymore, we're going to lose this whole generation of thinkers and brilliant ideas.”

As As I cling to my Gladwellian lifeboat and attempt to cultivate a daily writing habit free from digital distraction, I urge you to find whatever daily habit helps keep alive your own spark of curiosity. Because keep it alive we must, lest it get lost in this digital darkness..