Be Curious about one another

​If I were to say to you the word 'tree' - a soundwave would travel from my lips to your ears, where a vibration would then send a signal to your brain. Your brain then would go searching within you for some sort of reference - a memory of sorts - to make sense of this wave.

Maybe your brain finds an image of a tree you sat under as a kid. Or a tree that toppled on your favorite car in a bad storm. Maybe it would be a tree full of beautiful colors in the fall. Whatever the image, that would be how you would make sense of the soundwave I sent your way.

Those images would be how you hear tree. Which may or may not be what I was picturing when I told you about a tree.

Or maybe I tell you I got a divorce. And your mind scans for another image to match the vibrations of that word in your ear. Sometimes, though, the brain doesn't find images at all. Sometimes the search lands on the left side of the brain where we store words and rules and things we've heard and memorized over the years.

So when I say the word divorce maybe you hear God hates divorce. Or maybe you hear people who stay married are selfless, people who divorce are selfish. Or maybe you find the old platitude that children's lives are ruined by divorce.

I told you about a life altering event, yet you found a belief or a saying built on something you have never experienced - my divorce.

That is how our communication with one another works. We use words - or if you're on Instagram maybe you use photos - or maybe you share a song. But how we receive any of those things isn't determined by universal definitions or meanings - they are received according to what we know about those things and what we've experienced in life.

We walk around some days believing there are people around us who really need to get in line with the way of the world. When the problem isn't that people aren't in line with the world, the problem is people aren't in line with one another.

We are not shaped by the way of the world, we and our world are shaped by the way we respond to one another in the world. And so much of that response is built on what we think of one another, and not what we know of one another.

So often when those vibrations hit our ears, and those vibrations find those images or rules or platitudes - we stop. We stop short of wondering if my images are your images. We stop short of wondering if what I've learned is what you've learned. We stop short of wondering if your word is not the whole story, just an incomplete beginning of one. We stop short of wondering if my interpretation is your shame. We stop short of wondering if my way of seeing of seeing your word is your oppression.

We stop short - oh so short sometimes - of being curious.

We stop short of wondering what they really meant because our brain assures us we already know. We stop short of fully feeling their experience because our brain is begging us to feel our own experience.

Being curious is an intentional act that often goes against the inner working of our brain. Curiosity is not a completely natural act, especially when it comes to how we interact with one another.

But curiosity is a humane act. Because so much of what we know about the world doesn't come from the world at all - it comes from OUR world. Which often times excludes an awful lot of YOUR worlds.

Be curious.

Don't stop at your images. Be curious about the images around you.