Today I went back to a journal prompt from a few weeks ago.
What new possibilities might emerge if you viewed the unknown with curiosity instead of fear?
On the day, I received this prompt, I was in a hurry, so jotted a few lines and moved on with my day, but the question stayed on my mind, so I went back to it.
I think we can all agree that we are living in challenging times. The world feels loud and angry, with racism, anti-immigrant rhetoric, hate directed at LGBTQ+ people, at women’s autonomy – really at anyone who doesn’t fit a very narrow definition of who belongs and who doesn’t. The language of “Us versus Them” is everywhere. What used to be whispered is now said out loud, not only elsewhere, but also here in Canada. Not that the whispers were good, but the fact that people are now speaking loudly speaks to how safe they feel.
I’ve caught myself saying “I wish this wasn’t happening during my time.” But as Gandalf said, we don’t get to decide which time we are born in. We only get to decide what we do with the time we have been given.
So, what if instead of fearing the future, we become curious about why we’ve been given this time?
Every generation that has faced darkness had the choice to despair and to wait for someone else to fix it or to show up and be part of the answer.
People marched and are marching now. They sheltered strangers at great personal risk. People are using their bodies to create circles of protection against masked thugs. They are using whistles as warnings. They are buying groceries. And I’m guessing a lot of them are scared and doing it anyway.
I believe that curiosity is an act of courage. Fear closes things down and says “protect yourself, don’t look too closely”.
Both fear and curiosity ask questions, but curiosity asks different questions. Instead of asking “how bad could this get?”, curiosity asks “what can I do?” Instead of asking “why is this happening?”, curiosity ask “what does this moment need?”
I want my granddaughters to grow up in a world that welcomes the stranger, that sees the humanity in the person who doesn’t look or love or worship like they do. A world that understands that diversity isn’t a threat to strength. It is strength. Where empathy isn’t seen as a weakness and where there is no “Us versus Them”, there is only us.
I can’t hand them that world, but perhaps I can be part of building it.
I’ve been sitting with fuzziness of what my next chapter looks like. Maybe this is another part of my creation story. Maybe stepping into this new chapter is less about what I’m leaving behind and more about what I’m leaning toward. Maybe this is exactly where I’m supposed to be, in exactly this moment, curious instead of afraid.
The uncertainty is real. The things that are happening that should not be happening are real too, and naming them is important, but we have beaten this before. Humanity has stood at the edge of its worst impulses and chosen better and we can do that again.
