I am spending the week as faculty for a professional development conference for counselors who work at Jewish summer camps. On the morning after faculty arrived I walked into the office where all of our supplies are laid out to check on the materials I requested for my sessions. In my cubby area, next to my other supplies, there was a tie-dyed onesie jumpsuit that I had never seen before and did not request.
At first glance it looked like it was a hoodie and I thought, well, it’s a little cooler than I expected, maybe I’ll wear it. When I picked it up and realized it was a onesie I decided that I definitely had to wear it. I had maybe two seconds of wondering where it came from: whether someone put it with my things by accident, or someone saw it and thought I’d like it. But it was there and fit perfectly, so I put it on and went up to breakfast.
Several people commented on how much they liked it. A few people asked where I got it. I told them I found it with my supplies. One of my friends was entirely dissatisfied with this answer. What do you mean you just found it with your supplies? He asked. Don’t you want to know how it got there? Don’t you want to know who put it there? The truth was, I hadn’t really thought about it. I knew someone must have put it there, but I really didn’t think about who it was, or why they did it.
This was not at all good enough for my friend. Throughout the day he kept on asking me if I learned anything more about where it came from and was astonished at how much I was not interested, how I could not have any curiosity about where this onesie came from, how I could just see it in my supply area and put it on without needing to know why it was there, without needing to know the backstory.
I think part of what might have been confusing for him was that he knows me to be a very curious person, someone who is not quick to accept things at face value, someone who is consistently driven to seek the deeper meaning, someone who wants to understand the why and the how of pretty much everything.
I am not entirely sure why the unexpected arrival of a perfectly fitting, playful outfit amongst my program materials did not evoke my curiosity. I’m not sure why the part of me that loves to solve a mystery is not chasing clues and trying to figure this out. Perhaps this experience evoked a different version of curiosity, a more internal curiosity; a curiosity that was less interested in where this costume came from or why it was there, and more interested in what it would feel like to wear it, how it might impact me to adorn myself in a playful costume.
I wonder about these and other versions of curiosity: curiosity about how things came to be, curiosity about how things are experienced, curiosity about what will happen in the future. As someone who has spent a lot of my life pointing my curiosity towards the past, towards understanding and making meaning of things that happened before, I feel proud of myself for not immediately fixating on the origin of this tie dyed onesie. It feels like growth that I am engaging in the version of my curiosity that is interested in tactile experience, that is interested in the impact that my encounter with something unknown and unexplainable might be.
What this experience is teaching me is that curiosity is multidimensional, and dynamic. Curiosity looks backwards and forward, searching for meaning out of what has been and what might come to be. Curiosity moves through time preparing us to be in relationship with that which came before our arrival, that which is currently happening, and that which has yet to be. Curiosity invites me to look around me and understand that in every object, every place, and every being there is a story to explore of how it came to be here; there is meaning to make out of what it is currently doing and how I might relate to it; and there is an imagined future of where it might take me, where it might go, or what it might become. Curiosity invites me to be interested in all of those questions about any of the things that might cross my path.