Still Curious at Seventy

Curiosity is the thing I would keep if I could only keep one. Take away the schedule, the equipment, the contact list, even the stories, and I would still be fine as long as I got to keep wondering what is around the next corner. It is the one habit that has never once let me down.

People keep telling me that seventy is the age where a person is supposed to settle. Pick a chair, pick an opinion, and stay there. I understand the appeal. Settling is quiet and it is cheap and nobody argues with you. But every good thing that has happened to me arrived because I asked a question I was not qualified to ask.

Questions have been better to me than answers

An answer closes a door, politely, and sends you on your way. A question props it open. Most of what I have built started with somebody saying “that will not work” and me being too interested to leave it alone. Not brave. Just interested. There is a difference, and the difference is mostly volume.

I have been wrong in public more times than I can count. I have stood in rooms I had no business standing in and figured it out while the lights were already up. Every single one of those is a story now, and not one of them would exist if I had decided early that I already knew enough.

The day you stop asking is the day you start repeating.

What curiosity actually costs

It is not free. Curiosity means being the least informed person in the room on purpose, fairly often. It means admitting you do not know, out loud, to people who assumed you did. It means starting over at an age when starting over is not fashionable.

It also means you will chase things that go nowhere. I have a long list of those. A drawer of them, actually. But the ones that went somewhere paid for all the ones that did not, and they paid generously.

Where it leaves me

So here I am, seventy, still poking at things. Still writing down the half-formed ideas before they get away. Still convinced the interesting part of the road is the part I have not driven yet.

If you are reading this and wondering whether it is too late to start being curious about something again: it is not. It was not for me, and I have had decades of chances to decide otherwise.