life as i know it

"...everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." -Sylvia Plath

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

curiosity and the cat

The old adage says that curiosity killed the cat. But I wonder…was the cat happy before he died?

Curiosity pervades the human mind, and yet it proposes a dangerously thin wire upon which we walk. If we choose to ignore our curiosity, we never allow ourselves to take risks. If we never take risks, life would just be one boring, straight, road to nowhere. I imagine we would spend quite a great deal of time regretting the chances we did not take. And yet if we embrace our curiosities, we choose to enter an unknown territory of potential danger. So how do we reach a balance? How do we decide whether to acknowledge and entertain our curiosities or to deny and ignore them? Which path to choose…curiosity or safety?

There is no one right answer to the question. But I, for one, prefer to believe that the curious little cat died happy.

2 Comments:

At 10:42 PM, Blogger daringtowrite said...

Ah yes, I remember this post. I remember, too, thinking that if the curious cat did not die happily, he probably lived more happily than if he had never been curious.

I'm all for curiosity and risk tempered with a dash of sensible caution.

 
At 10:42 PM, Blogger daringtowrite said...

Or she.

 

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