Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose by Martha Beck

Author:Martha Beck [Beck, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Self-Help, Motivational & Inspirational, Body; Mind & Spirit, Inspiration & Personal Growth, Religion, Spirituality
ISBN: 9780593656396
Google: 0gMAEQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2025-01-06T23:00:00+00:00

Squirrel Interests

In the previous chapter, we talked about how you can rev up your interest-based curiosity by focusing on certain subjects. But within interest curiosity, we find a lot of variety. There are some topics that merely intrigue us and some that (once we’re free from anxiety) endlessly fascinate us, as ever fresh and compelling to us as squirrels are to Griffin. The more we learn about these topics, the more we want to keep learning.

Some curiosity is brief and easily quenched. For example, if I run into a perplexing clue in a crossword puzzle, just figuring out the word fully satisfies my curiosity. That’s not a squirrel-level passion. On the other hand, I’ve probably spent whole calendar years scrutinizing drawings and paintings, watched hundreds of online art demonstrations, and put in tens of thousands of hours experimenting with different techniques and media on my own. But I’m more curious about the visual arts now than I’ve ever been. That’s how squirrel-level interests affect us. To quote from Alice in Wonderland, they make us “curiouser and curiouser.”

If we follow anything that interests us far enough, we begin to encounter moments that fill us with awe, that give our whole existence more meaning. For example, Ram Dass, a spiritual teacher who started his career as a Harvard psychologist named Richard Alpert, used to give radical speeches about two of his favorite topics: yoga and psychedelics. One day, he spotted an elderly lady in his audience. She looked like just the kind of person who usually found Ram Dass appalling. Feeling a bit defiant, he gave a particularly outrageous speech about “experiences that I had had after using psychedelic chemicals, experiences that were very precious and far out.” After the speech, the woman approached him. As Ram Dass put it:

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