This whole thing started because I wanted to figure out how to journal.
Seriously.
I’ve never been a journal person. I’ve tried. I’ve bought the journals. I’ve looked at the prompts. I’ve understood why reflection is supposed to be valuable.
And then I sit there with a question like What do you really want? and my brain says:
I don’t know.
Or worse, I make something up because apparently the journal is waiting for an answer.
So recently I started wondering why journaling doesn’t work for me.
And, as tends to happen, I followed the question.
I realized that I actually reflect all the time. I just don’t do it very well by sitting alone and answering predetermined questions.
I think through interaction.
Something catches my attention. I say something about it. Someone responds. I react to that response. Maybe I agree. Maybe I don’t. Maybe I say, “No, that’s not it at all.”
And that gives me something new to respond to.
Eventually, I understand something I didn’t understand before.
That realization sent me down another rabbit hole into Human Design and what it means for me to respond rather than try to manufacture answers from nothing.
That raised more questions.
So I followed those.
And somehow, a rabbit hole that started with Why can’t I journal? eventually led me to something much bigger:
Curiosity.
Not curiosity as in I like learning interesting things.
Something much deeper than that.
Curiosity is one of the ways I engage with life
I’ve always been curious. That’s not a revelation.
But I’m starting to understand that curiosity isn’t merely a personality trait for me.
It’s a mechanism.
Something enters my awareness and creates a question.
I wonder if…
I wonder how…
Why is that happening?
What do I do about this?
Could I make that?
Why isn’t this working?
Wait. Why ARE we doing it this way?
And something happens.
I engage.
I start looking. I ask questions. I follow clues. I experiment. I test things. I learn just enough to try something else.
The question creates movement.
And that movement leads to discovery, which often gives me something new to respond to.
And off I go again.
From the outside, that can look like I’m all over the place
I am interested in a LOT of things.
Personal development. Human Design. AI. Technology. Nature. Tiny fascinating creatures. Business experiments. Websites. Creativity. Woo. Problem solving. Making things. STEGOSAURUSES!
I’ve never particularly disliked that about myself.
I rather like it.
But I don’t think other people always understand it.
We’re used to recognizing direction by looking at the subject.
Someone chooses a field. They stay in that field. They develop deeper expertise in that field. Their path makes sense because we can see where they’re going.
My path doesn’t look like that.
The subjects change.
A lot.
From the outside, that can look scattered.
But from the inside?
It feels perfectly coherent.
Because I can see the thread.
Something caught my attention. It created a question. The question activated me. I followed it.
Other people see the topic changes.
I experience the thread connecting them.
Understanding that mechanism means I can finally explain why a life that may look scattered from the outside feels perfectly coherent from inside it.
Maybe I’ve been looking for the wrong kind of consistency
For a long time, I’ve tried to figure out what connects all the things I’m interested in.
What’s my thing?
What’s the common theme?
What am I really about?
How do I fit all of these interests together in a way that makes sense?
I kept looking for the common denominator in the destinations.
What subject connects all of this?
What am I really interested in?
Where am I ultimately trying to go?
But maybe the common denominator was never the destination.
It was the way I travel.
I follow questions.
Curiosity organizes the movement of my attention.
And that feels incredibly freeing.
Because suddenly I don’t have to reconcile all these different versions of myself.
They’re not different versions.
They’re all me.
They’re simply different places my curiosity has taken me.
I thought I needed a smaller box
For years, I’ve struggled with the idea that I needed to narrow things down.
Find the niche.
Pick the thing.
Decide what I want to be known for.
Figure out which interests belong and which ones don’t.
But maybe I was solving the wrong problem.
It wasn’t about finding a box small enough to fit into.
It was about finding a box BIG enough.
And maybe that’s what I’ve finally found.
Not a subject.
Not a niche.
Not even an answer.
A way to understand the life I’m already living.
Curiosity.
A way of meeting the world.
A question that creates movement.
A reason to follow something simply because I want to know where it goes.
And suddenly, instead of trying to narrow my world down to the things that “fit,” I have an entire world to explore.
And the funniest part?
I got here because I wondered why I couldn’t journal.
I couldn’t possibly have known where that question would take me when I started.
I followed one question.
That question led to another.
And another.
And somehow, eventually, those questions led me here—to a better understanding of something that has been driving me all along.
Which may be the best evidence of all.
Curiosity doesn’t always give me a map.
It gives me the next place to look.
And apparently, that’s enough.