“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths,” Walt Disney.  This is a great statement I just found that follows what we discussed on Sunday regarding being understood and the human desire to understand.  Curiosity serves to show us how vast the universe really is.  Like a giant Mandelbrot set, we understand we are a fractal, a repeating pattern in a much larger scale.  We open all the doors we can seeking to find the pathways to the answers.  We know the more doors we open the deeper the rabbit hole and the curiosity will keep leading us further and further in.  If true, we will never find the end but we will always seek the answers.  That isn’t meant to be negative in any context—it is meant to further explain why we continue to develop new pathways, new ideas, and why we keep digging.  We know there is only so much we can see with the naked eye, but we know how much we feel.  The depths of those feelings are infinite, and logically, we understand that we can make sense of how we feel somehow.

While Disney’s quote refers more to the opening doors of creativity and developing new wonders for people, it also refers to the infinite nature of our role in the universe.  The very cells and patterns that create the human body and make us alive—the things we use to define us as alive—are seen repeated on the grandest scale of the universe.  We are part of a giant living organism, and each of us as a tiny cell in the big picture has a role to play—we each have a function.  We in turn, create other living organisms with unique purposes and the pattern repeats, each of us a potential door to something new.  This is why answering the call of what works for us is so important: we need to be able to fulfill our roles, our part, in the function of the larger organism. 

We are curious because we are always looking for new ways to do things, new ways to fulfill our purpose.  Curiosity is a way to do our job—the universal job, not the 9-5 we think we need to survive in a world that already fulfills our needs.  We’ve created systems that allow us to function outside of the natural realm—for example, we’ve created schools that teach our kids things.  The premise of school itself is actually cool and useful—let’s bring all the kids together to teach them about what has happened so we appreciate the past and learn from mistakes, let’s teach them about how things function today, and let’s guide them toward their purpose.  But what ends up happening is we lose the individuality of our own passions as school no longer supports self-discovery.  School has become a place where most kids become part of the machine to take their place in a system that only serves to benefit the few—and that is NOT part of the natural order.

Disney understood that curiosity brings out the magic in the world—it makes it front and center.  And while there are natural laws that govern curiosity as well, curiosity allows us to see beyond what we have created as a norm for people to function.  Curiosity allows us to marry our own ideas to the physical reality.  He also understood that curiosity creates a new reality—curiosity not only opens the doors but it creates them. We aren’t meant to be limited and bound by the rules we have created.  We are meant to work in the rules of nature, to understand our role with nature, and we are meant to be ourselves so we can build and expand.  Our very nature is expansive and that, too, is the role of curiosity: to expand our minds and physical reality because he understood that our minds create reality.  What is your mind telling you to create?  What doors do we see? And if we open that door, who else are we opening the door for?  Let ourselves run forward because we never know what example we are setting, and what else we can create for ourselves and others.