Every year in Vestmannaeyjabaer, Iceland, pufflings (baby puffins) fall from the sky and land at grocery stores, gas stations, and houses. The pufflings’ mothers leave them and they embark on their maiden voyage, but some get a little lost on their way to the sea. They can’t fly, only glide. Without human intervention, they’d be stranded. But the people of Vestmannaeyjabaer really love puffins. And this love leads to an annual mission to rescue these pufflings and release them to the water. The recovered pufflings are angry and confused and cute, and it makes all the sense in the world that the townspeople stop what they’re doing and stay up all night to rescue these birds.
I didn’t always know so much about baby animals. In fact, for most of my life I knew nothing at all.
A few months ago, Ayla started asking me very detailed questions about how different animals give birth. At the age of four she already knew more about most animals than I did and her questions were beyond the limits of my knowledge. To satiate her curiosity, we started a tradition of watching one video of an animal giving birth each night. Among others I’ve sadly forgotten, we witnessed horses, elephants, lions, giraffes, cheetahs, seals, orcas, seahorses, kangaroos, octopi, flamingos, rhinos, dogs and cats all have babies.
On recommendation of one of my coworkers, we started documenting the similarities and differences in how animals give birth. One night, Ayla started making predictions about how she expected a horse’s birth to go, based on what she knew about the other animals. She attempted to guess how many babies the mom would have (we must acknowledge here that seahorse dads carry the babies) and whether the babies would be born in a sac or from an egg. She was especially interested in how much blood would be involved. The best part of her predictions, honestly, was when she was wrong. She reacted with the intensity of a sports bettor who’d lost money on a bet and the joy of a child who just found out they were going out for ice cream. She placed little value on being wrong, instead beaming excitement about what she learned.
This ritual of watching baby animals giving birth gave Ayla an opportunity to deepen her knowledge of the animal kingdom and, importantly, it gave me an opportunity to learn about her. I guarantee I didn’t retain nearly as many facts as she did about these animal mothers. I do remember how her eyes twinkled when she’d watch the babies enter the world and how she continued to recite facts about baby animals at random.
I instinctively associate curiosity with childhood and I suspect that’s because it’s not a quality that’s often nurtured, recognized, or appreciated in adults. Curiosity is the tendency to seek out novel, complex, and challenging interactions with the world. It’s the process by which we seek to close the gap between what we know and don’t know.
Practicing curiosity consistently is associated with greater wellbeing, though there are some dimensions of curiosity that are more associated with personal growth and deriving meaning from new experiences. The five dimensions of curiosity are joyous exploration (exploring things for the sake of joy or positive experiences), deprivation sensitivity (having a high “need to know”), stress tolerance (pursuing independence and showing grit), social curiosity (wanting to learn about others), and thrill seeking (getting the most out of life).
I get annoyed when the things I have questions about have so obviously been documented in the scientific literature. This is one of those times. Deprivation sensitivity is the more intellectual side of curiosity. It’s defined by a desire to solve complex problems. I willingly researched three scientific papers for the Substack publication that I run in my free time because I want to, so it’s safe to say that intellectual curiosity is a core facet of who I am.
I would not trade this for the world, but it has its limits.
Intellectual seeking can provide a false feeling of certainty, and I’ve shifted my intention to cultivate curiosity about my inner world and the inner world of the people around me.
I’ve recently felt called to experience more silence than I’ve ever been comfortable with. I practice yoga more often, meditate more, and write more (unfiltered). What’s really helped is reducing my exposure to external stimuli like social media and TV. I’m sensitive to external influence and I needed space to find direction. I really thought I had my inner world figured out - but, actually, I had constructed a known version of myself consisting of beliefs and habits I did not actively choose. In many ways to my dismay, the only way to explore my inner world was to be quiet and listen.
What I’ve learned is that my inner world is far richer than I imagined. For someone who harbors a secret fear that I’ll one day run out of things to write or things to care about (or worse, that I’m not interesting enough), I’ve experienced the opposite.
Directing my curiosity inward has been a gateway to becoming more curious about others’ internal worlds. I’ve always been curious about people, individually and as a collective, but I’ve fallen prey to using theories, frameworks and shortcuts to shape my views. It’s an error in thinking that I see so often today. How easily people attribute others’ behaviors or characteristics to their gender, culture, birth order or zodiac sign, instead of probing deeper on an individual's actual experiences. These aspects may influence us but they are no substitute for the depth of a person’s experience.
To be curious about another person’s experience requires being able to sit with their experiences and your own. It requires one person to set aside the to-do list, the pain, the wants, and the desires and make space for appreciating another person’s internal experience. And then, for the other person to reciprocate. So often, we speed past the stage of understanding in favor of problem solving or trying to reduce someone’s pain. The deepest curiosity, in this moment with this person, is seeing them and being interested in learning more.
I take the fact that I’ve failed at this skill many times as an invitation to practice and grow more. In the spirit of curiosity, I love being challenged and I feel like this will be one of the greatest challenges of my lifetime.
I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea about the pufflings of Iceland, if it weren’t for Ayla’s fascination with baby animals. Her curiosity opened a door for me to expand my interests and perspective beyond what usually consumes my time and attention. I actually didn’t learn about the pufflings because she wanted me to. I, in my own free time, came across a podcast episode in which Sam Anderson heads to Iceland for the puffling release.
While Sam is with his host family, he shares his own sadness about his oldest daughter leaving for college. Slava, the mother, responds “you know, when you have your child, you know right away that you don’t own them. You just have to take care of them.”
And so it is - for our children, for our partners, our friends, our bodies, and the Earth. We own nothing and nonetheless are responsible for taking care. Part of recognizing that we don’t own anything is understanding that our inner experiences are valid and meaningful. Others, too, have their own rich inner experiences that we know nothing about, but we can ask. It’s through extending this curiosity that we give others the space to be seen.