The Power of Curiosity

Yesterday after lunch, Rye and I strapped on our skis and slid down into the woods. It was the perfect day for it; the eight inches of snow that had fallen the day prior was almost effervescently light and of that idealized not-too-cold, not-too-warm temperature that provides both uphill grip and downhill glide. It was like skiing through a cloud. Heck, there were even little angels flitting about, singing soft ballads of love and redemption. Ok, so actually, there weren’t. And in full candor, I’ve never skied through a cloud. But if I had, I bet it woulda felt just like what yesterday’s skiing felt like.

The boys are good skiers. Not in a technically proficient way, but in that way of children who have been on cross-country skis since they could walk, and have learned to ski on thickly-treed pitches, atop frozen-hard crusts, through wallowing powder, and in the thin, barely-skiable accumulations of late October and early November. We avoid lift-served resort skiing; it’s too expensive, too far, and just not our scene in general. This is sort of ironic, since I was  an editor at SKIING magazine for many years. And whooee, but I sure did love that sort of skiing at one point in my life; there ain’t nothing like a big powder day on your favorite ski hill. Used to be, six, seven, eight years ago, I’d set the alarm for 4:00 on powder mornings, so I could milk and slop the pigs by headlamp before heading to the mountain to meet friends in the parking lot, where we’d affix climbing skins to our skis and bag a couple runs before the lifts started churning. Used to be.

Rye and I didn’t ski for long; maybe an hour. Every so often, I’d lose sight of him, only to realize that he’d dropped to his knees to examine a set of tracks, usually ones I’d blithely skied over, hardly even noticing as they disappeared beneath my skis. Sometimes I wish I were as curious as my children. Most kids are pretty curious, I think, but it seems to me as if an awful lot of adults aren’t actually that curious. It’s as if humans were born with a fixed amount of curiosity, most of which is expended in childhood. I wonder why it’s like that. Maybe it’s just that most of us are too busy to be curious. Or too distracted.

It’s funny, but I never really thought of this until yesterday, watching my son crouched in the snow, trying to weave a story out of the meandering path of some four-legged night walker: If we don’t leave room in our lives for simple curiosity, we just keep living the same story, over and over and over. If we don’t leave room in our lives for simple curiosity, we’ll know only what we’re told to know. If we keep thinking it’s all about being smart and talented and ambitious, we risk becoming so wrapped up in our pursuit of these things that we forget to simply be curious. What a thing, huh?

Which is why the third time I saw Rye bent over a set of tracks, I went and bent with him.