The love of curiosity

The universe, or rather your universe – everything as it is perceived by you, and only you – can feel like a lonely place if no one makes an effort to see things through your eyes, hear through your ears or walk in your shoes.

Everything, although substantiated through language, history, science and mathematics, exists for us only through our perceptions. There is almost no falser proclamation in any universe than, “I know how you feel.”

50,000 people, 50,000 universes

This was on my mind last Friday, standing in Preston Park, Brighton, with someone I love and 50,000 other souls taking in the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The sun was setting behind the stage, throwing colours across the evening sky, and the scale of the event was overwhelming: tens of thousands of people gathered in the park, all facing the same direction, listening to the same music, watching the same performance.

50,000 different experiences taking place.

I noticed how a song or moment that brought tears to a person’s eyes didn’t impact others in the same way. I thought about how a lyric might have transported somebody to a memory that no one knew they were having. One song might have reminded someone of a person they had lost, while for someone else it may have brought to mind a person they had just fallen in love with. Others would have simply been overwhelmed by the grandeur of the event – the music, the sunset or the sheer number of people around them.

We were all there, all looking at the same stage, yet none of us was inhabiting quite the same universe. Being next to a person I love, I was acutely aware of this. While we were next to each other, we kept checking in, sometimes with words, but mostly nonverbally, with a look, a hand squeeze, or an arm around the other.

As the evening became more emotional, I had the sense that we were aware not only of what we were feeling ourselves, but also of what might be happening for the other person. There was a profound intimacy in experiencing something so enormous together. Among the sea of people, there was a person whose experience I was viscerally curious about and wanted to know.

When a shared experience disappears

Then about halfway through the show, as the sky darkened, they began to feel lightheaded and decided to move out of the melee and to the edge of the crowd where they could sit down. Of course, I understood their decision, and I was pleased that they were looking after themselves. But beyond the slight guilt I felt for not leaving with them, something in my experience of the occasion changed.

The music was still playing, and 50,000 people were still facing the stage. Yet, something had gone. It wasn’t simply that the person I loved was no longer standing with me. Rather, it felt as though the part of the experience that had belonged to the two of us had popped and disappeared. I could still have my experience of the event, but the experience of having a shared experience was over.

Since then, I have been thinking about how much of our experience of the universe is created not only by what we perceive ourselves, but by knowing that there are others perceiving it alongside us.

We discover ourselves through each other

Is this part of what it means to be a relational being?

That we don’t only exist as isolated consciousnesses in the universe, but rather that we discover ourselves through our relationships. We learn who we are from the way other people respond to us, from what they notice and ask about us, from their misunderstandings and from what they invite us to see. Another person may become curious about a part of us before we have even considered being curious about it ourselves.

Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher who wrote about the interconnectedness of everything and the causes that shape human behaviour, was interested in what might make human beings freer. He believed that becoming aware of the causes that shape us could move us towards a different kind of freedom. Not freedom from causation, but greater freedom from being unconsciously governed by it.

Centuries later, Eric Berne, the ‘father’ of Transactional Analysis, introduced the notion of script: how, unless people could become aware of the injunctions and drivers governing their behaviour and decisions, they could live their lives according to patterns whose origins remained invisible to them.

Perhaps, however, awareness is not something we can arrive at entirely on our own.

Sometimes someone else sees what we cannot

We can be introspective for our entire lives and still not see something obvious until someone else asks us a simple question:

• What does that song make you feel?
• What did you need at that moment?
• What are you noticing now?
• I wonder why that matters so much to you.

And while the questions themselves may or may not be particularly remarkable, there is something deeply profound about the intentionality behind them: our experiences are not the same. I don’t assume I know. I want to understand.

It’s at this point, I think, that curiosity becomes something more than a character trait or a means to feeding an intellect. Curiosity becomes the antithesis of“I know how you feel.” It becomes an acknowledgement that however well we think we know someone, their experience is ultimately their own. Curiosity leaves the other person open.

There is a humility in curiosity. Even though I may have felt something similar, may recognise the situation or the circumstances, or I may be certain that I understand, I cannot know what it is like to be you, simply because I know what it is like to be me.

Falling in love with someone's universe

Where do we feel this more than when we fall in love?

When we meet a person and fall in love with them, we become almost voraciously curious about them. We become genuinely interested in their history, their habits, the things that make them laugh, what frightens them, the music they love, places they remember and opinions they hold that no one else seems to share.

What is it about it that you like? What are you thinking? What were you like as a child? Why does that song mean so much to you? We want to understand, and as much as we can, enter into their universe.

And perhaps even more profound is the experience of being the object of such curiosity. When someone else wants to learn about how the world looks, feels, sounds, and tastes from your perspective, it feels extraordinarily intimate.

Show me your world. There is something electric about being seen in this way. You are not simply being looked at – you are being wondered about. Could this be what we mean when we say we are seen by someone? Rather than our existence merely being noticed, they have become absorbed in the particularity of it.

When curiosity gives way to certainty

Sadly, in relationships, perhaps as we begin to think we know each other, this curiosity seems to give way to certainty, and questions give way to explanations:

• He’s like that.
• She always does that.
• I know why they’re upset.
• That’s just who they are.

We stop asking; we start assuming.

However, none of us remains exactly the same. The person you were insatiably curious about when you first got to know them is not quite the same person in front of you today. They’ve adapted to the changing world; experiences have changed them; they’ve remembered things; they’ve forgotten things; they’ve been hurt, and they’ve healed.

Curiosity, to some degree, might be what keeps us alive to each other. It says: Although I know you, I don’t assume to know all of you all the time. Perhaps this is especially important because we are so busy trying to understand ourselves.

We spend so much of our lives inside our own universes, fixated on our relationships, our careers, our families and our futures. We stew over our past behaviour, our past interactions with people, whether we are doing enough and indeed, whether we are enough. We are, in a sense, constantly trying to figure out our place in the universe.

It can feel almost impossible to step out of the echo chamber of our own existence and become genuinely, actively curious about someone else’s. Not to compare their experience to ours. Not curious in order to fix them. Not because we want to tell them what we think. Just curious because we want to know.

The therapeutic power of being wondered about

And this is one of the things that I think is so deeply profound about the therapeutic relationship. For 50 minutes, to have another person’s attention deliberately oriented towards your experience, your universe as you perceive it.

And while the words matter, the questions matter; they are part of the expression of something much deeper: I am interested in you. Not because the counsellor already knows who you are. Not because they are fishing for a theory that might explain you, nor because they are waiting for an opportunity to interject with what they think you should do.

But because they are genuinely curious to discover how the universe makes sense from where you stand. What does this mean for you? What comes up when you say that? When have you felt this before? What are you noticing now? Perhaps the most important thing is not the answer to the question, but rather the experience of having the question asked.

Being curious about another person is not a neutral act. In Gestalt therapy, phenomenological inquiry involves an active curiosity about the client’s experience, and it communicates something: your experience matters. I don’t take for granted that I know you. There’s always more to discover. You are worth taking the time to understand.

The love within curiosity

And I think this is what I mean by the love of curiosity.

There’s the love of curiosity: the joy of exploring, wondering and discovery, and the willingness to remain open rather than to settle on certainty. And then there is the love within curiosity: the expression of the care communicated when another person is truly fascinated in discovering who and why we are.

Perhaps being curious about someone is a small yet profound recognition of their separateness from us: that their universe is not ours; their history is not ours; their meanings are not ours. And instead of being threatened by that difference, we are interested in it. Maybe, when love is at its best, it contains curiosity. Maybe friendship does, too. Maybe therapy does.

Conversely, could it be that in a world where, even though we move alongside other people whom we love, we can experience isolation and loneliness because of the absence of curiosity – theirs and ours?

While we can never completely inhabit another person’s universe, we can remain interested. We can resist the comforting certainty that we know all there is to know about them. We can turn towards them and ask in whatever words the moment requires, words like tell me. Help me understand. How did that make you feel? Perhaps sometimes, that is where love begins.