An acquaintance of mine who is just retiring from a mid-level, bureaucratic government job of 25+ years told me yesterday that she is scared about the prospect of not coming to work any more. She’s been used to having someone telling her what to do each Monday through Friday for over two decades and isn’t quite certain how she’s going to fill what she seems to consider the impending gaping void of her retirement.

I asked her, “Well, what are you interested in?” expecting that she’d rattle off a whole list of interests and passions that she’d put off until retirement.

She eased back into her chair, face blank, and replied, “I dunno.”

As a horsewoman, I spend a lot of time tapping into my horse’s natural curiosity. The horse’s natural curiosity is key to his survival in the wild. It tells him to stay because it’s safe, or to flee because there’s a predator. This gives him confidence for living. And the horse’s natural curiosity requires me to think on my feet. It even necessitates that I be curious about him. I think most horse people will understand what I’m talking about here.

Oh, of course, there are best practices. John Lyons does it this way. Clinton Anderson’s recommendation is that. The Parelli method is thus and so. And while those are all fine methodologies, when it’s just me and my horse in the arena, the round pen, or at 8,000 feet on a snarl of switchbacks in the Pecos wilderness—I’m own my own. It’s time to intuit. Communicate. Create solutions. Inspire confidence in a very large animal and help him understand what it is I’d like him to do. And every horse is different, exponentially increasing the need for the creativity of the horseman.

As the mom of two grade schoolers, I get to observe natural human curiosity each and every day, which is a joy, even if that level of sheer energy causes me to want to pull my hair out every now and then and collapse into an exhausted heap. This simply underscores my point.

I’m convinced that most adults like my retiring acquaintance have lost their curiosity. The last time they remember being creative was doing something with that crayon in the third grade, and perhaps even then the teacher told them exactly how to draw the tree with three red circle apples hanging from a trio of celery stalk branches surrounded by a green cloud of leaves. I’m pretty sure the curiosity has been squashed out of most of them under the weight of day-to-day living in our culture.

We’ve managed to lose touch with the curious part of ourselves. Most of us are simply doing what we’re told. There’s something real important here about survival.

How about—

Just like the horse, we need to know when to stay or when to flee. A horse trainer in Colorado says, "Curiosity creates confidence." Now that's a recipe for living.

Life is too precious for “I dunno.”

Sources: Gaping Void; Horse Bliss
Flickr photo sources: notcatherinezeta; pesi