Welcome to S.O.W.

The purpose of this project is twofold. It is a means for me to indulge my curiosities and in doing so I hope to inspire you to indulge yours. Curiosities are something we are born with. But somewhere along the way we learn to ignore it… our sense of wonder. It is what makes young children both fascinating and annoying. If you have the patience to step out of your life and indulge them, you realize children are just feeding their innate need to wonder and learn. And if you travel down that path with them, again with time and patience, you will find yourself starting to question some things that you have learned to accept because inevitably after all the why’s, you tell them – because that’s just the way it is. More often, we find young kids annoying especially if you don’t have any, because we don’t make the time for them. Even more we get annoyed because they ask questions we don’t want to think about. Because to think about them is to re-think our societal conditioning.  We all have it, even those that go against “the system”.

Little by little we have all learned to turn off our innate curiosities.  It’s something that happened incrementally as we ‘grew up’. It may have started as a young child when too many adults grew impatient with your questions and you learned to appease, not annoy, and therefore you stopped asking. It may have happened when you went to school, and you were made to feel as though your questions were “stupid” and you stopped asking to avoid ridicule. It may have happened if you were a girl and you learned to not question and instead to please as most girls are still inherently taught to be polite. It may have happened when you are looked upon as ‘not knowing your place’ if you are a person of color and it is expected – at least in American society — to accept and not question. Or it may have finally happened when you got that job you thought you wanted only to realize it was not what you thought it would be like — but you let it go and learn to not question because it was the price for the life that is expected of you.

I fit many of those categories myself. A curious being by nature that learned to stifle that part of myself. Secretly though, whenever I had free time, I would indulge a curiosity here and there. Maybe it was a novel I was reading, and something sparked a question… a wonder. Instead of letting that thought pass and shrugging it off, I allow myself to wander off with that thought. I stop whatever else I am doing, and I inhabit that space of unadulterated academic pursuit, where nothing is at stake. I am simply seeking an answer to a question I honestly had never thought of before. And I hunt that answer for the pure joy of saying — even if just to myself — I know this. And those moment are an utter joy for me. Many of us can think of a similar experience. But as we get older, we have fewer of these moments not only for the reasons I have already stated. Many of us fall victim to time. Time, the most finite of resources we all lack as we “grow up”. There never seems to be enough of it and so much we want to accomplish in a day that has too many hours of obligations and not enough rest. Let alone time to be, explore, and wonder.

Interesting thing, time. Because when the pandemic first surged and we retreated and hunkered down in our homes, it became our most abundant resource. One that drove some of us mad, while others tried ever more inventive ways to pass the time. Many of us tackled things we had never done before, because why not? I think we all know of the sourdough bread fad that ensued. Some tackled projects that were too time consuming to attempt before the pandemic. Like that renovation you’ve been wanting to do, or binge watching all of Netflix. We all have to pick the hill we’re going to die on. I found myself increasingly following my wondering thoughts — because I had the time to wonder and wander off into a research project that could be 30 minutes, several days, and in one case a newfound topic of interest that is now months into the learning process. The latter I may tackle later right here – stay tuned. As the pandemic wore on, I found these times of researching purposeful and accomplishing. They re-ignited a piece of myself I had forgotten existed. But she was there all along, in the periphery of my mind. And as we continue to struggle with this pandemic but also find a new normal, I don’t want to forget what I re-discovered in the last year and half. Better yet I want to remember to never sideline that curious mind again. With each post I will share a curiosity and what was learned from it. Hopefully you will learn something too, but more importantly I hope to spark your own sense of wonder.