Fragments From Floyd

Published in Road Less Traveled / Floyd Press -- for July 6, 2006

I stood on the back porch listening as two pileated woodpeckers beat a drumming dinner call from the hillside behind the house. How exactly do they know where to bore for their meal, I wondered? And before I knew it as I stood there musing, I had become a beetle grub in a dark tunnel, hidden inside that pine trunk. I could feel my insect skull as it was rattled by the living jackhammer that would soon become my doom. Closer and closer came the business end of that massive beak to my thin, pale and segmented beetle skin. So this is how it ends, I thought. (And it was about here that I wondered if I maybe I'd seen too many Gary Larson cartoons over the past decades.)

This little mental scenario, of course, was just a day-dream, a wandering of thought and a wondering about the nature of nature and how it all works on a scale we usually don't imagine. And it occurred to me just then that several times in the days before, I'd had conversations that turned to the matter of just this kind of curiosity and inquisitiveness. "Do all adults harbor a sense of wonder, or is it lost in childhood for most?" asked one friend. Do today's children have the imaginations that we think we had as children? And is a sense of wonder, awe and curiosity essential to being a fully-developed human, to maintaining a healthy culture and society? Are artists, by necessity, curious people? I have no answers, but I have a lot of questions.

Like most, I suppose, I am only curious about a limited range of things. I have always felt a vague guilt for not being the least bit curious about how my car, or lawnmower or my word processor work. I just want to pull the crank and start driving, mowing or writing. I don't have much curiosity about numbers either, and never understood my account-father's fascination with tax laws and ledgers. On the other hand, I'm sure that most accountants or mechanics haven't a clue what I see so fascinating about the sex life of flowers or the biology of salamanders. But I've been fascinated with nature since before I could talk, my mother tells me, and at fifty eight, I'm still a boy when it comes to mind's play and imagination in the out-of-doors. This, I consider a valued and abiding trait, while many others would think it foolish and a waste of time should they drive by someday when I'm lying flat on my stomach in the wet pasture taking spider web pictures.

But I would encourage this: that each of us nurture a passionate and curious relationship with some thing--a hobby, an idea, or a discipline--as life moves beyond childhood into the busy lives of adulthood and parenting, then from mid-life into retirement years. Nurture curiosity. Years ago, I was privileged to know Max Thomas, who at 92, still would tell me "I'm studying on that" when I offered a medical or biological explanation he didn't fully trust or understand. He never stopped being inquisitive and curious, and it enriched his life--and his neighbors--to the end. Learning takes a lifetime.

It is simply a matter of good mental fitness and personal growth as we age to have a passion for something worthy of our time, to hold some question before us whose answer will always stay just out of reach. I trust our schools are teaching our children in such a way that they experience a driving curiosity, which sometimes means shaking predictability and routine up a bit. Mark Twain remarked that "If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way."

Don't settle for too tame a world devoid of frequent moments when you stand silently in wonder. The illusion of full knowledge is often the end of the matter--but we don't have all the answers in our Age of Science. Those of us who are older can remain children and play, even if our joints and muscles don't honor our commands as they once did. Go out and hold a cat by the tail. And tell us what you've learned.