Jen Koch

As I write this I’m savoring the quiet of a friend’s home, watching a backyard teeming with little lives. The favorite is a chipmunk, striped and small and round, bustling around the patio planter it’s made a home. Every so often it pauses on the corner like a gardener surveying fresh beds of vegetables. What they’re up to, other than the typical cycle of foraging, I can’t fathom. But it’s fun to wonder.

Beyond them are squirrels, rabbits, starlings, robins, and a cardinal or two. Just what you’d expect from a lush midwestern yard. I’ll never know what they’re thinking. I can read about animal cognition studies, like this squirrel study in Berkeley, and make an educated guess. I could use my imagination, although Zefrank has already done a bang-up job. But I’ll never know, any more than I’ll know the private thoughts of the humans in my life.

It’s a little bit intimidating, taking a moment to consider the sheer breadth of cognition going on around this planet. There’s a not-insignificant chunk of humanity awake and conscious with me right now, including you! If you happen to be reading this in the next three to five hours, at least. There are billions of humans thinking in the world, experiencing internal lives only they will witness. Maybe some of them are even blogging and bird-watching at the same time (with a side of cat-watching – my friend’s cat is napping next to me). I’ll never know. I’m blessed to never know, no matter how curious I become. That’s the beauty of an internal life: whatever we choose not to express or illustrate is ours alone. Whatever we choose to express is always done through the filter of our experience. While we chuckle nervously to one another about the ‘mortifying experience of being known,’ the truth is that we never truly will be, and thus never fully measured by anyone but ourselves.

The best we can do is recognize that truth, humble ourselves, release our preconceptions of motive, and ask questions. So much human suffering is exacerbated by our struggle to truly see one another; our incurious failure to honor the private lives around us. We’ll only ever fully know one human experience, but the more we humbly acknowledge our limitations, the richer that one experience will become.

Humans aren’t chipmunks, of course. Humans are much larger, for one thing. For another, we (generally) don’t eat maple seeds (although you can eat them, apparently), preferring to curse at them in frustration as we weed them endlessly from our flower beds. I can’t speak to the complexity of an average chipmunk’s life, but human lives are incredibly complex, and the most fortunate of us can expect to navigate decades of complex experiences. Given the sheer variety of human experiences out there, we owe it to ourselves to be a little more curious.

Curiosity is the antidote to fear. It’s the antithesis of prejudice. It’s also a handy cure for boredom! Why live a little life, surrounded by the neat jars of your preconceived ideas about reality, when you can ask a new question? Why not get a glimpse into a life you’ll never be able to experience? Looking at myself with curiosity is the root of living with my anxiety. It makes sense that turning that curiosity onto my environment might make living in the middle of all this mess more manageable.

And like, real talk: we have one life. Shunting people into my little pre-made boxes seems like an unnecessary amount of work and waste of time on my part, and a poor way to spend the next forty to fifty years. I know to some extent it’s unavoidable, since my human brain loves patterns as much as it loves finding community in commonality. But stretching my curiosity muscles has made me better equipped to question my first thoughts and open myself to new information. We spend more time as a species being afraid of each other than pretty much other species on this planet I can think of. Safety as we define it, as we expect it, is an illusion. It’s a story we tell ourselves about how much control we really have in our lives. Trust me, control is a lie. Being curious is one way to make sure you happen to your life, rather than reacting to all the uncontrollable shit that gets thrown at you.

Be a little more curious. Wonder about the lives around you. Ask a few more questions. Be still and listen with an open heart. Who needs to have an opinion on what you learn? Unless you’re planning to run for office anytime soon, certainly not you! When you get wherever you’re going, when the journey ends and the destination arrives, what do you want for yourself? A full life? A certainty that you were kind and did your best by the lives coming after? The deepest possible experience of humanity? The garden is rich and lush with life, and you only have a few decades to learn as much as you can. Nobody has time for assumptions.