The Value of Curiosity

Written By Maeve Gale

“Curiosity...[creates] a kind of pleasant sensation of unfinished-ness and of something just around the corner…Curiosity is what gets me so involved in something that I forget myself.” - Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing

There’s a reason we therapists love curiosity. It discourages assumptions; it allows us to embody a beginner’s mind, and to make the therapy room a more equal and collaborative space. With curiosity we accept, even celebrate, knowing how much we do not know - we’re ready to listen. 

Curiosity encourages compassion, inside and outside of therapy. Instead of shutting down thoughts, feelings or behaviours with shame or judgement, we can get curious about what’s underneath. What experiences led us to believe this thought? How does this feeling show up in our body? And so on. 

Curiosity also creates deep attention - not just towards ourselves and our inner world, but to the whole world around us.

“Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding--seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions--and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence” - Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing

Practicing Curiosity

Curiosity about others

Try practicing playful curiosity with others; see what you learn and how you feel. Whether you’re talking to a new acquaintance or someone you’ve known for years, there’s so much to be surprised by.

Here are some questions you might try (adapted from List Happy, by Vanessa King):

  • What was your favourite toy or game as a child? What did you love about it?

  • What’s the kindest thing someone has ever done for you?

  • What’s the kindest thing you’ve ever done?

  • If you could try living in a new country for three moths, where would you choose and why?

  • What’s your favourite place locally and what does it mean to you?

Curiosity about the world around you

Try going for a walk and practicing curiosity. See what you notice around you that you’d like to know more about.

  • What kind of mushroom is that and how did it get it’s name? What’s that building used for? Where did that street name come from?

  • Decide on a colour and see where you notice it on your walk. How did that colour come to be there? What is it like to focus your curiosity and attention in this way?

Curiosity about yourself

There are countless ways to practice curiosity toward yourself. One way - that can be tried alone or with others - is through (self) interview. You may have heard of the Proust questionnaire, popularized by Vanity Fair, which you can find here.

And, if you’re curious about this questionnaire:

The Proust questionnaire is a series of 35 self-revealing questions. The questionnaire first came to life in 1886 when Antoinette Faure (whose father was to be the French President Félix Faure) asked her childhood friend Marcel Proust to fill out a questionnaire in a ‘confession album’, a popular parlour game originating among the Victorian literate classes. Proust was only fourteen at the time, and wrote in a second confession album at age twenty; his precocious answers ended up having an astounding influence over time, solidifying the Proust questionnaire as one of the most widely administered personality quizzes in history. This legacy began in 1924 when Antoinette Faure’s son André Berge - a psychoanalyst - had Proust’s first page of answers published posthumously in a French literary journal titled Les Cahiers du Mois. Alongside it, he offered a psychoanalytic analysis, thus being the first to situate the questionnaire as a window into an individual’s personality This concept surrounding the set of questions has evolved and solidified over time. It has been called a ‘verbal Rorschach test’, and is now popularly known as the one-page glimpse into a celebrity’s inner thoughts at the back of every issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

Maeve Gale
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