Natural Born Curiosity
I’ve always loved to learn more about myself. I used to do those psychological quizzes in magazines. They aren’t necessarily correct most of the time, but they are fun, and they often made me think about new aspects of myself I might not have thought about before.
The desire to grow is deeply inherent in me. I just plain love it and think of it as the core reason for human existence. I love learning. I was born curious and I am doing my best to not lose this trait! Staying curious is staying engaged in life. I don’t mean the nosy kind where you want to know the nitty-gritty about your neighbours so you can gossip about them better. I mean an innate thirst for knowledge that makes almost anything interesting, or at least makes you want to learn enough about to see if it sparks your interest. It’s an attitude towards life that makes everything worthy of further investigation. It’s also a playful energy that makes me come into contact with things and people in order to see how it affects me, if it triggers me to want more.
For example, people are very interesting; there is no uninteresting person on the planet. Sometimes, the tricky thing is having enough time with a person to find out why they are special, especially since human interaction is always a two-sided process. In order to see a person, he or she has to be open to make him or herself visible. But when that happens, and you are allowed in and you are open in the same way, the beauty of a human being and human relations is awe-inspiring! It’s incredible how complex, intricate, and divinely designed we humans are!
Naturally, I am interested in many different things, but when I start to explore a new field of interest, I don’t dabble, I jump in full force. For example, take my new adventure of the curly-haired life. I have had curly hair all my life, but I recently had the desire to embrace it more. I went searching, and stumbled across a method of how to treat my hair very naturally and according to my hair’s needs. Actually, that seems simpler than it is: you have to understand your hair type, its porosity, and the ingredients in everything that touches it, the techniques of how to style your hair, and on and on. All this information sounds quite overwhelming, and at first it was. But, I know that I am visual, as well as a hands-on learner. So I watched YouTube videos for hours, got myself a selection of appropriate products, and allowed myself to go by trial and error to see what works for me. There were moments when I wanted to throw in the towel! I got so mad when after all the effort applied my hair would look worse than ever before. What kept my sanity intact was what always keeps in intact when learning something new — eventually creating what I started off to create, results.
Results are important and incredibly motivating to me. Even the tiniest notion of a result can keep me going when I get to the point where learning something new becomes difficult. Knowing I have created results in the past gives me the assurance I can do it again. Years ago, I remember learning an especially difficult move in belly dancing. It took weeks before my body was able to settle into this new pattern, but once it was there the movement came easily. That was a lesson in itself, as now I always draw upon this success when I meet a new “something” that seems impossible to me. I learned to trust that eventually it will become easy.
Written by: Sabine Roggermeier; Gluecklich Im Sein
