By Rev. Dr. Kharma R. Amos, Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Brunswick, Maine
Lately, I’ve noticed how quickly I can move from my better self to my worst impulses.
I’ll be honest: I am not always the person I want to be. I can leave a moment of genuine warmth and community, feeling uplifted and connected, and within ten minutes of turning on the news or encountering someone in traffic, find myself firmly planted on a mental soapbox, being judgmental about other people or their words, actions, or choices.
I suspect I’m not alone in this.
Somewhere along the way — and our current cultural moment has accelerated this considerably — many of us have replaced curiosity with certainty. We sort people into categories before the conversation has even begun. We decide, on very little evidence and a great deal of assumptions and imagination, who someone is and what they deserve.
Researcher Brené Brown has spent years studying how people navigate hurt and uncertainty. What she found: when we don’t have enough information about someone, we don’t sit comfortably with not-knowing. We fill the gap with a story — largely fictional, built on a handful of data points and narratives we ourselves invent. And then we act on that story as if it were fact.
Brown makes another observation I find both humbling and freeing: most of the time, we aren’t judging out of malice. We’re judging out of fear. Over time, we learn that curiosity — like vulnerability — can lead to embarrassment or hurt. So we stop choosing it. We reach instead for the armor of already-knowing.
Understanding judgment that way — as a wound, a survival strategy that has outlived its usefulness — makes it harder to be self-righteous about my own, and harder to be contemptuous of anyone else’s.
Psychologist Todd Kashdan, who has spent his career studying curiosity, connects it directly to contemplative spiritual traditions. Curiosity, he argues, is what Buddhist teachers mean by beginner’s mind — meeting each moment and each person with fresh eyes. His research confirms what spiritual teachers have long known: the absence of curiosity breeds stereotyping, rigid thinking, and the kind of closed-mindedness that makes genuine human encounter nearly impossible. In a recent study on political conversation, Kashdan and colleagues found that curiosity is a “promising catalyst for more open-minded communication regardless of political ideology” — available to all of us, in exactly the moments we are living through right now.
Broadcaster and writer Krista Tippett has spent decades sitting with people whose worlds are radically different from her own. One of the most important things she has learned: we can disagree with another person’s opinions, their politics, even their deepest convictions. But we cannot disagree with their experience. Once we understand something of someone’s experience — how they were shaped, what they survived — something shifts. The difference in what we believe may remain. But it no longer defines what is possible between us.
Curiosity is not a personality trait some lucky people are born with. It is a choice — and a discipline. Choosing it requires us to surrender to uncertainty, to the possibility of being surprised or changed. That is why it belongs in the category of spiritual practice: alongside any discipline we take up not because it comes naturally, but because it helps form us into the people we want to be.