Why Curiosity Is Becoming My New Religion

A couple of years ago, if you had asked me what I believed about healing, I could have given you an answer.

Actually, I could have given you several.

I had spent years reading the books.

Taking the courses.

Collecting certifications.

Learning the language.

Like so many women searching for healing, I wanted to believe there was a path. If I learned enough, practiced enough, understood enough, eventually I would arrive somewhere called “healed.”

I wasn’t trying to fool anyone.

I genuinely believed I had found something worth sharing.

But underneath all of that certainty was a woman who was barely holding herself together.

I just didn’t know it yet.

Looking back now, I think I spent years collecting explanations.

Not healing.

Explanations.

“This happened for a reason.”

“Everything is a lesson.”

“The universe is teaching you something.”

“Your trauma is your greatest gift.”

Some of those ideas brought me comfort for a while.

Some probably helped.

But eventually I noticed something I couldn’t ignore.

I slowly realized that, for me, I’d become better at collecting the language of healing than actually doing the difficult work of healing.

I had become very good at explaining suffering.

That isn’t the same thing as recovering from it.

The realization was uncomfortable because I had been part of that world.

And once I saw it, I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t.

So I stopped.

Completely.

For a while, I didn’t know what I believed anymore.

That turned out to be one of the healthiest things that had ever happened to me.

Because once all the certainty fell away, something else appeared.

Questions.

Not the kind of questions that demand immediate answers.

The kind you carry around for weeks.

Sometimes months.

Sometimes years.

Questions like…

What if not everything happens for a reason?

What if some things are simply acts of random cruelty?

What if healing isn’t finding meaning in everything that happened?

What if healing is learning to live anyway?

Around that same time, therapy gave me a piece of information that rearranged my entire understanding of my life.

I had spent more than forty-five years living in survival mode.

From about the age of four until my fifties.

I didn’t know there was another way to live.

At first, I was devastated.

I grieved the life I thought I had missed.

The trips I never took.

The hobbies I never tried.

The friendships I kept at a distance.

The countless decisions I made based on safety instead of curiosity.

I spent a long time looking backward.

Wondering who I might have been.

Eventually, though, another question appeared.

If I’m no longer trying to survive…

What actually brings me joy?

The answer should have been easy.

It wasn’t.

I honestly didn’t know.

Not because I didn’t enjoy anything.

Because I had spent decades making decisions based on responsibility, usefulness, and other people’s needs.

I had become exceptionally good at functioning.

I had no idea how to simply live.

So I started getting curious.

Not because I suddenly knew what I liked.

Quite the opposite.

I realized I honestly didn’t know.

If someone had asked me what brought me joy, I don’t think I could have answered without listing things I thought I should enjoy.

So I decided to treat it like an experiment.

I started looking for small adventures.

Not big, life-changing adventures.

Ordinary ones.

I drove to Calmar looking for the perfect cinnamon bun and came home talking about an apple fritter instead.

I took a road trip back to Revelstoke, a place that still feels tied to an earlier version of me.

I went fishing simply because I’d always wondered if I might enjoy it.

I sat beside a river with a notebook and realized that sometimes the quiet is the whole point.

None of these things changed my life overnight.

I’m still at the beginning of this experiment.

I still catch myself trying to make every outing productive.

If I’m driving somewhere beautiful, part of me immediately starts wondering if there’s an errand I could run while I’m there.

It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, but after decades of measuring my worth by usefulness, that habit doesn’t disappear just because I noticed it.

Sometimes I still have to remind myself that an afternoon doesn’t need to accomplish anything beyond being enjoyed.

There are still places I want to go.

The best taco.

An even better apple fritter.

A cinnamon bun that’s somehow worth an even longer drive.

There are books I want to read, trails I want to walk, little cafés I want to discover, and probably a hundred other things I don’t even know I’ll love yet.

That’s the part I’m beginning to enjoy.

Not knowing.

These days, I’m becoming much more comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”

A few years ago, that sentence would have made me uncomfortable.

Now I think it might be one of the most honest things I can say.

People sometimes ask me what I believe.

The truth is, I’m less interested in collecting answers than I used to be.

I’d rather ask an honest question than cling to a comforting explanation.

I don’t need every painful thing that happened to have a hidden purpose.

Sometimes terrible things happen because people make terrible choices.

Sometimes life is unfair.

Sometimes there isn’t a lesson waiting patiently inside the tragedy.

Oddly enough, accepting that has made me feel more peaceful, not less.

Curiosity has replaced certainty.

When I don’t understand something, I don’t feel the same pressure to immediately explain it.

I can wonder.

I can change my mind.

I can discover I was wrong.

That no longer feels like failure.

It feels like freedom.

I still read widely.

I still explore ideas that challenge me.

I still find beauty in spirituality, psychology, science, literature, and the ordinary wisdom of people sharing their lives.

But I hold all of it a little more loosely now.

I think curiosity asks more of us than certainty ever does.

Certainty invites us to stop looking.

Curiosity quietly asks us to keep going.

I’m still learning.

I’m still asking questions.

I’m still discovering things about myself that probably should have been obvious years ago.

Some weeks my Joy Quest looks like a road trip.

Some weeks it looks like sitting on my deck with a cup of coffee because I forgot that resting counts too.

I don’t know where all of this leads.

For the first time in a very long time, I’m surprisingly okay with that.

Curiosity hasn’t answered all of my questions.

It’s simply given me permission to keep asking them.