The Age Of Curiosity

If you’ve been around kids long enough, you’ll agree with me that if there’s one word that better describes them, that word would be curiosity.

It's within human nature to be curious, especially kids. We’re all born with a craving to know more, a yearning of something bigger & beyond.

We dream & imagine of places that we have never been. We ask endless questions & we long for answers that would satisfy our craving.

When you’re young(during our formative year), you want to understand how every part of the world around you works.

This yearning is one of the fundamentals that differentiates us from other species. At core this is what makes us human.

To clear things up , as you might have wondered by now about what I mean by the title “The age of curiosity”

A little defining will help to bring context. According Mark Zuss, Assistant Professor in the Graduate Reading Program at Lehman College, in the USA, who’s the author of “The Practice of Theoretical Curiosity” The term curiosity is heavily associated with all aspects of human development, in which derives the process of learning & desire to acquire knowledge & skill.

I like the simplicity of the earlier definition cited by Wikipedia, it defines curiosity as a “motivated desire for information”

It is not difficult to see that during childhood, especially between the ages of 5-11 kids are curious about everything that they can find their hands on.

If they ask you, what color is that & you respond, it's white, they’ll ask you “why is it white?”, they can even go as far as asking you “who said it was white & how do you know if it's white? On the surface all this sounds like stupid questions & many adults would try to avoid such questions.

Could it be that the opposite is true? That its the adults who have become stupid to accept the world as is without questioning? Kids don't mind going down the rabbit hole until they get to the bottom of what seems a simple matter at the beginning.

“It's not a silly question if you can't answer it.” once remarked Jostein Gaarder, a Norwegian intellectual & author of several novels, short stories, & children's books.

Gaarder, who himself often writes from the perspective of children, exploring their sense of wonder about the world.

It is a fact that curiosity forms part of human experience throughout life otherwise we would stop to be humans but it's also a fact that as we grow older, our fantasies, dreams & curiosities get crushed with the daily struggles of life.

In place of what was a curiosity for knowledge, information & understanding it turns into a never ending yearning for the unknown. What a missed opportunity. Hence the title of the article “the age of curiosity”

If “the age of curiosity” is not well taken care of, times don't wait for you, you can never turn back the clock of time.

If by chance you end reading this article here. Here’s my proposition. As already noted, curiosity is a motivated desire for information & knowledge, it is thus fair to conclude that curiosity forms the foundation of our intellectual life & it’s not hard to see that it’s at its peak during our childhood.

If this is true , It then means if we don't take advantage of the “age of curiosity” we risk becoming adults who do not understand who we are, & the world that we live in. We’re blown by every wind of ideas that comes our way..

On the other end if the right environment, & material is provided, you have a solid foundation of who you are & your role in the world. We become in other words firmly rooted.

There could be many ways of feeding the cravings during the age of curiosity but there’s one that has stood the taste of time which is reading. Reading is a better way to quench the curiosities of childhood.

It is the unfulfilled curiosities of childhood that become the emptiness in adulthood.

If there’s any individual in our modern time who encapsulates this idea it's Elon Musk , the American Inventor who a few years ago started launching Rockets into space. Although Musk never studied Rocket Science in college, he first learned about rockets by reading books. "I was raised by books, & then my parents,” he once remarked in an interview.

Much of the mysteries of the world we yearn to understand can be unraveled by simply reading, but reading has to start somewhere & what a better time to inoculate the culture of reading than during the age of curiosity. Be curious & stay curious.

The end