The candle cost more than lunch and burned a hole directly through its center, leaving a white wall of wax around the flame like the candle had built itself a gated community. I stared at it, wondering if I was meant to feel something about it. Was the candle a metaphor for something? My heart? My curiosity? Some other part of me that I hadn’t yet noticed was hollowing out?
All I know is that it was beautiful and annoying at the same time, which feels like a fair summary of most things in my life. That candle, with its self-imposed boundaries, felt like something I should’ve recognized. I’d spent a lot of time trying to keep my own flame bright, only to end up feeling like I’d missed something essential.
Curiosity has always been treated like a problem. You have too many interests, they said. You ask too many questions. You’re moving in too many directions at once. In a world that prizes the specialist, curiosity was framed as a lack of discipline. A sign that I needed to focus harder or narrow myself down into a more digestible version.
But here is the unruly truth I’ve come to embrace: Curiosity is how I understand the world. It isn’t a distraction from the work. It is the work. The myth of the scattered mind says that if you aren’t walking a straight line, you’re lost. But when I tried to shut those doors, my world got smaller and my ideas got thinner.
Curiosity isn’t chaos. It’s attention. It’s the refusal to look away just because something doesn’t have an immediate use case. It doesn’t mean you can’t commit to a project or a person. It means you’re listening closely to the nuances before you make that commitment. If your mind wanders, explores, loops back, and asks questions that don’t always lead to immediate answers, that doesn’t make you scattered. It makes you perceptive.
So, I let the candle be. I let it burn itself into whatever shape it felt it needed to become, and I watched. Because sometimes, the only way to see the shape of the thing is to let it burn.