Empowerment Through Thought

When we are scared or hurt we have a natural tendency to want to pull away. Its human to want to run when the stuff we are dealing with feels like too much and the difficulty of it all might swallow us up.

But, for those who are brave enough, there is another path.

Let’s say your aquaintance has presented you with some new information that, if true, would radically transform the way you’ve thought of yourself for the past 10 years. In that moment, you have a choice. You can find reasons to reject this new information. You could say:

“Oh but you don’t really know what you are talking about”

“Nah, that can’t be right. Hey let’s talk about something else…”

“Pft. That’s stupid. It couldn’t possibly be true because X, Y, Z.”

Or, you could choose a different path.

You can acknowledge that this information is BIG, perhaps even life changing, AND you can choose to give yourself the gift of curiosity.

The phrase “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it” is often attributed to Aristotle. And while it’s pretty clear this is not what he said (see an interesting breakdown of this error here: https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/22/nope-aristotle-did-not-say-it-is-the-mark-of-an-educated-mind-to-entertain-a-thought-without/ ) the gist of it is pointing to something important.

When we respond to challenging or surprising or threatening or disruptive information with a sense of curiosity we are changing the game. We go from being in a position of defense where we feel as though we must quickly find ways to reject the information in front of us to immediately putting some distance between ourselves and this information.

To be curious requires that you step back from the information you are exploring. You go into a part of your brain that is more innocent, more childlike. When you are curious, you don’t have to accept any particular conclusion. When you are curious you just get to see what is out there. And its hard to be defensive when you are busy exploring.

It is a power move to pause when startling information comes toward us and respond to it with curiosity. Rather than decide that this information is “good” or “bad,” curious people allow themselves the space to simply explore the information.

As Aristotle didn’t actually say, but sort of gestured at, entertaining an idea without actually having to accept it is a difficult and important thing to do.

Imagine the next time you are presented with some jarring information, perhaps its about one of the people who mistreated you in your life, or maybe its about the political beliefs of someone close to you, or maybe its about a family member – instead of allowing yourself to immediately get defensive, you allowed yourself to be curious.

Imagine asking the source of this information questions about the topic. What if you explored how this information came to light? What if you explored how confident the information source is in the accuracy of the information? What if you explored any cooraborating information to check to see if the new information in question makes sense?

Imagine getting curious about your own response to this newly discovered information. What if you reflected on why this information provoked such a strong emotional response from you? What if you got curious about the part of yourself that might need some extra TLC in light of this new information? What if you transformed this potentially upsetting information into something that sparked the next big step on your own healing journey?

They say curiosity killed the cat, but as a philosopher I think curiosity might be the very thing that save us.