Weak Curiosity

On self-control, curiosity, and the power we give to others.

Photo by Roman Empire Times on Unsplash

“At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—’Come out unto us.’ But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

When my wife and I were first married, my grandfather said to me, “Having one child is fun, but the party really starts once you have at least two.” When I asked him why, he said, with a grin, “Once you have two, every time there’s a fight, you’re always trying to figure out who started it.” He wasn’t wrong.

The playroom on the second floor of our house is positioned right above the dining room. Whenever my wife and I have guests over for dinner, and once the kids finish eating and go upstairs to play, the ceiling inevitably starts booming. The chandelier shakes; shouts and thuds galore. We always chuckle when we see our friends’ wide eyes with each thud. “It’s nothing,” we’ll say. “The only time we start to worry is if there’s crying after a thud…or total silence.”

Interestingly, most of the crying in the house has nothing to do with physical pain, though that’s normal, too. Most research estimates that the average male toddler has anywhere from 2 to 4 bruises on his body at any given time, and I think just one of my son’s shins has that covered. But, the majority of the time, crying has to do with how one brother feels about the other. “He made me mad, he won’t share,” and “He said this,” are among the most common complaints right now when I go upstairs to ask the kids what happened. And, while it’s low-stakes and sometimes comical in the moment, I’ve realized how little of this attitude we’ve lost as adults.

When I was 8, I remember my father calling me to his office and handing me a handwritten note. He told me to run it downstairs to my mother. I was bewildered to find her in her closet, lights out, in tears. She took the note and closed the door. Later, when I asked her why she’d been in there, she explained that my father had said something unforgivable, though I never found out what. For most of my life, I always recounted this story with the perception that my mother was being ridiculous. However, after some of the events that transpired as a result of my father’s words and actions before their divorce, I’m not sure she was ridiculous at all. Our spouse’s words and actions carry weight; usually more weight than anyone on earth, and they should. But where is the line drawn?

How many people in the world hold that power over us; the power to irritate, devastate, discourage, enrage, and cheer us up? When we come home from work and snap at our families because we had a rough day at work, someone said something to us in public, someone cut us off in traffic, and so on, how are we so different from my toddlers in the playroom? “She gave me a bad review, my boss pissed me off, this guy at the store was a jerk,” and sometimes, our lips tremble as the words spill out when our spouses pull us aside to ask what’s wrong. We often move through our days, constantly vulnerable, open to being offended by anything that hits us the wrong way.

Proverbs 25:28: “A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.”

We often think of self-control as the restraint that we exercise over our actions, but that’s just the final product, the external fruit of the internal practice. If our actions are the fruits of self-control, then how we exercise it in our minds is the seed. When I’m offended, if I can rein in my opinions of others, transforming my kneejerk reactions to intentional curiosity, I not only keep myself from doing something outwardly stupid—I help restore my inner equilibrium, and therefore, my ability to let it go.

When my wife is quieter than usual, when her face is sterner, when her tone is more direct, before I run and hide, (half joking) I try to remind myself that she may have had a bad day. Her opinions, her ideas, her desires, her actions, everything about her is of the utmost importance in my life, and I care for her so much that if she’s having a hard day, I do my best to readily give her the benefit of the doubt.

In other relationships, especially ones that shouldn’t be so meaningful, there’s a distortion of this that often affects us too deeply: we take people’s harsh words, opinions, and actions far too heavily while simultaneously giving them far less patience. The driver who cut me off in traffic obviously hates me and is a bunch of four-letter-words. A coworker who rubbed me the wrong way with their attitude is out to get me and is a lazy, conniving person. A mean person on Facebook…I won’t even go there. We apply what we imagine are their most malicious thoughts to ourselves while, at the same time, we hand out our cruelest judgements.

Proverbs 16:32: “Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.”

I think it’s no coincidence that, especially for young men, interest in stoicism has had a resurgence. It seems everyone has an opinion on it; whether it’s useful, what true stoicism is, and how to best practice it. When I read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, I found many great nuggets of stoic wisdom that still stick with me. I only worry about when we see something like stoicism only as a “self-help” method, and less about how we can use it to be of help to others. Stoicism, when we use it only as self-improvement, is just another way I can defend my own mental peace. But, when we’re only focused on our inner peace, then we’re all the more indignant when we feel it’s been violated. If we take a step further past stoicism as self-help and move into curiosity, we end up with something that looks an awful lot like charity and love for others.

Of the passage I quoted earlier, my favorite sentence of Emerson’s is, “The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity.” The most notable part about this is curiosity—the curiosity I have for the other. A stronger curiosity makes me look at the other driver on the road and wonder if they’re dealing with an emergency. It makes me wonder if my coworker or the person at the store is having trouble at home. And, as a byproduct of my curiosity, when I get home, I’m usually at peace with my day, and with everyone who’s been a small part of it. Otherwise, in my worst moments, I’m no more mature than my toddlers in the playroom, teary-eyed and pointing fingers.