What happens when we stop being curious?

 

What happens when we stop being curious?

I have heard that curiosity is the most powerful thing you own. After dealing with 35 years of practice and meeting ample people, I always feel curious to know why, where, what, which way, when and how something happened, and it gives me clarity about why people behave in different manners. Many times I feel that for a normal person, raising normal children is much easier than raising special children, but still we don't understand and value that. So many parents of normal children feel that it is so difficult to deal with today's generation because even to have faith in God, we have to give explanations to them; it doesn't happen naturally. For this, we are only responsible. We follow a spiritual path nowadays because other people are following it, but not because we truly believe in it. Information on social media has become our guide, so we have stopped applying our own mind and being curious.

Recently, I visited one place where everything has been made by a leader under his observation. Many minds have worked hard to make it bigger, and it looks so elegant. Now, if a few minds in every direction and every area become powerful, imagine what wonders it can do. But we people have stopped observing and thinking because we don't apply our minds; we just go with the flow. One leader should not just explore one area; rather, he should allow great minds to think in every direction. The major issue is that after spending money in one direction, raising that much money becomes the next journey, so in that vision, other parameters don't get explored.

Today, everyone's major parameter has become to earn money, but in earning money, we will work for a short time, whereas if we empower an individual, it goes long term. If you see Lord Krishna or our ancestors who were kings and queens and were leaders, their area of working was to listen to everyone. If they were suspicious about something, they used to change their attire, go into the public and understand their difficulties, and work on them so that each and every member, whether poor or rich, remained happy.

Many times, when I work with or am with my loved ones and they come out with their anxiety and anger, my mind becomes curious to know why this incident happened. Many a times, an answer comes because that person got influenced by someone, and that person did not see why I did something to help rather than to create issues. Many times, understanding that helps us to resolve situations very easily.

Today's kids need to be trained to observe things, use their minds to think, analyse things and resolve them. But what we parents are doing is sending them to classes or tuitions where certain parameters are set, or we let them follow guides where answers are already ready. We as parents help them to do projects or do their work so that the child can compete with other kids, but somewhere we make them so dependent on us that they don't think about what is happening around them. The major issue is that we don't even help them to analyse what is good and what is bad.

Even earlier, when we used to work with deaf kids, parents used to think the child would not understand, so they used to talk with gestures or, to make them understand, they would speak in a few words or short sentences. Working with them, I discovered that speaking with them normally and allowing their minds to think about what different sounds are, and how to detect, identify, discriminate and comprehend those sounds, helped them learn language and speech much faster and helped them understand and speak near normally. The same formula needs to be worked with normal people as well, which will help us to understand the situations and circumstances around us. Why don't we do that?

At every stage, from thinking about having a baby, working with babies during the gestation period, giving birth to a baby, helping children grow, making them speak, seeking their education and higher education, getting a job, selecting a workplace, selecting a life partner, maintaining relationships with the partner and being in the social world, society and country, everywhere, if you sit and think, we just go with the flow rather than applying our own curious mind to think about what is good and what is bad for us. I can give ample examples for the same.

Maybe the real question we need to ask ourselves is not whether we have enough information, but whether we are still curious enough to question that information. Curiosity makes us stop, observe, think and then take a decision. If we teach our children and also remind ourselves to keep asking questions, understand the reasons and not simply follow what everyone else is doing, we may be able to create a generation that does not just follow the flow but has the courage to think differently and choose what is right for them.