When I first set out to become better acquainted with my own curiosity I simply paid close attention to where it led me and captured notes, ideas and images as I went along. For a while this was enough to help me make sense of my experience and inform my next steps. Now, however, things are beginning to spiral out of control.
Remaining responsive to the lived reality of being curious is generating such a wealth of material and interesting possibilities that I’m beginning to drown in the chaos and lose my sense of direction and purpose. Interestingly, the clarity I’m looking for eventually arrives thanks to a little help from my curiosity.
Tired of ploughing through notes that only throw up yet more knotty questions, I decide to facilitate my own process in a more creatively curious way. I grab a book and open it at a random page. The book is Susie Dent’s ‘Word Perfect’, a collection of 366 words and their etymological backstories, one for each day of a leap year.
The particular word I’ve landed on is ‘@’. I read her short account of its origins and the chain of events through which this once-niche symbol became ubiquitous in digital communications. Then I scribble down the first ideas that come into my head.
Rat @@@. The c@ sat on the mat. Where am I @? The ‘a’ with the curly tail. Tag, you’re @!
Interesting, that last one. A user tag. A declaration of unique identity. I am @estherwaite, currently in the middle of a short and sweet experimental exercise in search of insight. I’m listening to my curiosity to see where my attention is being drawn, keen to discover what there is to learn from doing so.
So, what am I learning?
That it doesn’t matter which book this happened to be, or which page I happened to choose. What matters is the quality of dialogue between what I already know and what I’m discovering through doing this activity. That when I engage with my curiosity the specifics of what I’m doing might take any form. That the continuity in the work stems from me, locating myself here at the heart of the inquiry, providing a point of return no matter where my travels happen to lead me.
The sense of overwhelm I’ve been experiencing melts away as I envisage myself setting out on multiple excursions, some lengthy and some – like this one – extremely brief. Sometimes I’m mapping brand new territory, sometimes I’m revisiting familiar ports of call with fresh eyes. Wherever my curiosity takes me, it’s not going to be one long, disorienting adventure into the unknown. Wherever I may choose to follow, I’ll eventually return home equipped with stories to tell, discoveries to share and new skills to add to the mix.
This frame of reference make sense when I look back through my notes and consider the dynamics of the different activities I’ve been drawn to recently. This short encounter with the ‘@’ symbol involved a rapid cycle of learning and discovery that’s feeding into the ongoing development of a ‘meta’ perspective for my programme of work. My current experiments with mixed media materials have a slower pace, feeding into the work I’m doing to develop the visual language I use to communicate my experience of the Calderdale landscape. My ongoing efforts to decode the mysteries of DAW software feed into the longer-term development of my skills working with audio.
There’s a place for everything and my unique vantage point on the world is the place where all these diverse strands intersect, here at the centre of it all. It doesn’t matter how I direct my time as long as I’m engaging with my curiosity and paying careful attention to what I learn through doing so.
As I continue join the dots between the contrasting places my curiosity has been taking me, another metaphor springs to mind. It’s a bee moving from location to location, mapping out reliable sources of nectar and pollen, securing food for its journey and nourishing the collective life of the hive on its return.
