Choir Notes

Curiosity
From Music and the Spoken Word
Delivered By: Lloyd D. Newell • Program 4247

Have you ever noticed how innately curious children are? Just spend a little time with them, and they’ll ask you questions about anything and everything. How does electricity work? Why is the sky blue? How can airplanes fly? Why does it get dark at night? And a hundred other questions.

Then, as we grow older, it seems that we stop asking, we stop being inquisitive, we stop wondering as much. It’s certainly not that we now know everything; perhaps we just get too busy or distracted or worn out to wonder and ask.

Fortunately, some of us never lose that childlike curiosity. The drive to discover, to learn new things, to investigate, is the fuel of progress, of innovation, of science and exploration. Such people see something ordinary or interesting and ask, "Why?” They read or learn something new and ask, "How?”

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and author David McCullough has written several books on a variety of topics. But he says that when he began each of them, he knew very little about the subject on which he was writing. It was his inquisitiveness that moved him. "I feel that each book is a journey,” he says, "an adventure, a hunt, a detective case, an experience, like setting foot in another continent in which you’ve never traveled. That’s the joy of it. That’s the compulsion of it. And you’re fired by what we human beings are blessed with, called curiosity. It’s what, among other things, distinguishes us from the cabbages. The more we know, the more we want to know; curiosity is accelerative.”1

Curiosity is both an emotion and a skill, and we can develop it. Perhaps becoming more childlike and looking through the lens of awe and wonderment is how we begin. Then by reading, asking questions, taking a class, talking to others who know more, we can become more curious about life. We can experience amazing things if we will open our eyes and hearts to wonder.

1 In R. Scott Lloyd, "A Celebration of Family History,” Church News, May 8, 2010, 15.