What Might Be Hiding Inside the Black?

Am I a curious person? I think I am. But lately I've been wondering about a slightly different question:

How often am I curious about myself?

When I was in Primary (Kindergarten, for those of you who didn't grow up in Nova Scotia) my teacher, Mrs. Shupe, was away sick one day.

Our substitute Mrs. Lynch arrived bubbly and enthusiastic and announced to the class: “We're going to do an experiment!” I had no idea what an experiment was, but I was curious.

She made her way around the classroom and placed a small square of paper on each student's desk. Then she came around again, this time with a black felt-tip pen, putting one small black dot in the centre of every square. So far, I was unimpressed.

Then she asked us a question.

“What do you think will happen when I come around again and add a drop of water?”

“The paper will get wet!” someone said. “The ink will get blotchy,” someone else guessed. Both seemed pretty reasonable to me. She made another trip around the classroom, placing a single drop of water onto each black dot. And then something happened that I can still picture more than fifty years later. The black began to move.

As the water spread through the paper, colours appeared from what had looked like ordinary black ink. They travelled outward until that tiny black dot had become a beautiful ring of colour. I was amazed.

Who knew such beauty was hiding inside the black?

I've never forgotten that experiment. At five years old, I suppose the lesson was about ink and water and colours, but looking back at it now, I see something else. We make assumptions about what we see all the time.

Black is black.

This is how things are.

This is what I'm good at.

This is what I'm not good at.

This is what someone my age can do.

This is what healthy eating looks like.

I've tried this before.

I'm just not that kind of person.

And when we're certain we already know the answer, there isn't much reason to investigate. Curiosity creates a little space around certainty. Instead of This is how things are, we can ask:

I wonder if there's more here than I can see?

Instead of I can't do that, perhaps:

I wonder what I could do?

Instead of That didn't work for me, perhaps:

I wonder why it didn't work, and what might work differently?

That doesn't mean the answer will always be the one we want. Curiosity isn't positive thinking. It's not pretending the black dot isn't black. It's being willing to add the drop of water and see what happens.

I think about this a lot in relation to aging. It's easy to absorb assumptions about what our bodies should be capable of at different ages. But what if we haven't actually discovered what we're capable of yet? There's only one way to find out.

Experiment.

Maybe that's one of the most useful things curiosity gives us. It doesn't require us to know the answer. It only asks us to be willing to investigate. There was much more inside that little black dot than five-year-old me could see. I wonder how often that's true of us, too.

What else might be possible?