Feed your Curiosity, Don’t kill it

Written by Michelle Tanmizi

I have always known myself as a highly curious child.  So curious, I remember having driven my mother up the wall with questions about everything.  I was a ‘what-why-how’ child.  When my older sister had her first period, I remember stalking her outside the bathroom door because I wanted to see what it was all about.  Needless to say, I was not a popular sibling and a source of constant frustration for my mother.

When I was in secondary school, I discovered the joy of owning a library card and there began my almost daily foray of my school’s tiny library shelves, in search of books on how things work, living and inanimate.  The librarian grew to recognise my strange taste in literature and was often surprised at my choices.  I read every book the library had on creatures great and small and how they came to exist.  It was fantastic.

So when I first heard of the phrase, “curiosity killed the cat”, I was perplexed.  If anything, my curiosity was what propelled me forward in my career and my personal life.  Had I not been a curious creature, I would have married straight out of my master’s degree, never left the country where I was born and would not have had a three-page-long Curriculum Vitae by the age of thirty.

Curiosity, I would say, helped me live a life of wonder, excitement and adventure.  I was always ‘pushed’ to want to know what lies beyond the line of conformity.  Curiosity helped me get more and more educated, helped me experience things others would be afraid of, meet people from all walks of life…

Today, many still use the phrase, “curiosity killed the cat” to warn people about going beyond what is necessary.  It puts caution in the wind.  If not for curiosity, we will not have a lot of the things we enjoy today, including the computer, the portable telephone and the aeroplane.

So I got curious and wondered where that phrase came from.  This is what I found from Wikipedia: “The earliest known printed reference to the actual phrase “Curiosity killed the cat” is in James Allan Mair’s 1873 compendium “A handbook of proverbs: English, Scottish, Irish, American, Shakesperean, and scriptural; and family mottoes”, where it is listed as an Irish proverb on page 34.”.

The original form of the proverb, was “Care killed the cat”, where ‘Care’ was defined as ‘Sorrow’ or ‘Worry’.  And the earliest printed reference to this phrase was made back in 1598 by a British playwright, Ben Jonson, in his play, “Every Man in His Humour”, which was performed first by William Shakespeare.  That original proverb makes more sense to me than Curiosity killing a cat.

To all of you out there, I would say, dare to be curious!  Learn to question instead of jumping to conclusions.  Don’t just accept because everyone does so – instead, go and find out if the information is true.  Learn to discern and to wonder.  Learn to learn or should I say, re-learn to learn!  Be curious and ask questions.

I wonder if wars could end earlier and discrimination laws could be abolished sooner if people had asked themselves more questions instead of just accepting things as they were?  Questions like: “Is this right?”, “Is this True?”, “Is this the right thing to do?”, “Is the government right?”, “What are the real facts?”, “I wonder if I can make a difference?”

Change can only come about when people start to become curious of the current situation and question whether the situation is still true and valid.  Change is one of the by-products of Curiosity.

America was forever changed when a man had a dream and was curious and wondered what it be like to have a country undivided by race and skin colour.  We now have the luxury of sitting in flying machines because two brothers were curious to know if man could fly.

In fact, all of today’s inventions are products of curious minds – Minds that wonder at possibilities, at how to overcome impossibilities, at how to achieve goals, at how to break the limits…

So feed your curiosity.  Do not starve it.  Nurture a curious mind.  You never know, that Mind may one day bring us to the moon and back in a day.  Encourage curiosity.  Let it blossom and bloom.  We need people who dare to dream big and dare to be different.

Gandhi was right when he told us to “Be the change you want to see in the world”. And only through a curious mind can you achieve that.

• Change
• Curiosity
• Possibility
• Self development

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Michelle Tanmizi

I am an Author and Motivational Speaker.