What is your greatest strength
If someone asked you to name your greatest strength, what would you reply? Apparently for President John F. Kennedy, it was his curiosity. That answer might seem surprising for some, but not all. Albert Einstein was said to have insisted that he had no special talents …. He was only passionately curious. Eleanor Roosevelt also held inquisitiveness in high regard: “I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.”
Are you wondering why curiosity might be so highly viewed? Well, on a very basic level, learning about our environment, and how to access food and keep ourselves safe are vital to our survival. But after that, curiosity can also take us to a new level of understanding of our environment by encouraging us to explore new ways of doing things, solve problems and investigate possibilities. And then there’s my favourite side of curiosity, which is so prevalent in children: the wide-eyed sense of wonderment that helps us to grow and expand our lives.
What I want to know is why so many of us lose our curiosity and can even shut it down as we grow older. This question is particularly relevant in our current social and political environment. I’m not just talking about the U.K. or U.S., but the entire world. There seems to be a general lack of curiosity, understanding and even regard for those who are different from us.
Our world is made up of different continents, countries, races, languages, cultures, religions, etc. The human race is far from homogenous and that’s the beauty and vastness of it. It saddens me that many are threatened and repelled by these differences. What if we could just allow ourselves to be curious about them instead? That’s my question for you this week,. I invite you to be curious about things that are different from you or your way of thinking. You don’t have to adopt or take it as yours. What if you just accept that this difference exists and respect it for exactly what it is.
Here’s a little poetic reminder from Rudyard Kipling that might help you to become more comfortable with differences and curiosity:
“I have six honest serving men
They taught me all I knew.
I call them Why and When and Where
And How and What and Who.”
And I’ll close with one more citation that I hope will bring a smile. Don’t worry “that curiosity killed the cat.” One ending to this proverb goes “but satisfaction brought him back”!