It got me from Aldous Huxley to voicing your Terrible Twos at work.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of sham, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
Aldous Huxley
When I was thinking where to begin this week’s postings around the nature of curiosity I found this Huxley quote. However, I have a brain that gets caught by several different threads all at once, and what caught me with this quote wasn’t the curiosity, but the intelligence and ardor, the intolerance of sham, and the clarity and ruthlessness of vision.
To be honest, ardor caught me first. It immediately conjured up a Bridgeton narrative (a Netflix / Julia Quinn playfully sumptuous reimagining of Regency England, which for some reason got the blood boiling of certain Austen purists). Yes, it’s old fashioned. I really doubt whether anyone outside the world of performance politics would use it, now. However, it caught me because of this very lack of modernity. It resonates with precision and depth of feeling. Children are remarkable for their ardor. Ardor is passion, zest, fire. These synonyms create a taste and texture for ardor. It’s a noun with verbish tendencies.
Intolerance of sham had a different effect, although sham carries a slightly dusty Victorian fakery about it.
However today, more often than not when we hear it, read it, or speak it, intolerance relates to the daily experience of those who don’t have the right face, speak the wrong language, lack the correct papers, fall short on their education, or don’t have the financial leverage to meet the demands of the power brokers, the gate-keepers, those who write the rules. And yet here we are coupling intolerance with sham. It conjures up an almost physical inability to stomach fakery. And there’s something bigger and bolder and more damning about that fake, that fraud, that lie because it’s not tolerated. And that intolerance is meted out by a child.
Finally, I reach Children are remarkable for the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
A child having a ruthlessness of vision? It is uneasy, almost offensive to put ruthlessness and child in the same sentence. One thinks of a dictator, a tyrant, a cat with a mouse, but a child having a ruthlessness of vision. So, what is Huxley offering us?
The child who creates an idea, harbours a wish, seeks a particular outcome, will single-mindedly pursue this without fear of or concern for others.
Meet 2-year-old Tia.
Today she had been horrible. Terrible. Every cliché. And while painful for everyone in her orbit, part of a process.
Meeting Tia got me thinking. Part of emotional maturity is self-regulation. However, we’re often not very good at this, even as adults. To some extent we’ve mastered our emotions, although for mastered, I’d read learnt to control. We’ve fallen into line with what is normative practice socially and culturally. We use language to dampen the effect of our feelings, on ourself and others. However, suppression, as we know through experience, creates mounting pressure and on our off days feelings find a way of seeping out and our day can get messy, angry and potentially damaging personally and professionally.
Therefore, wouldn’t it be more grown up, as we have the power connected language, unlike Tia, not to mention more helpful for us and all those around us if we learnt to say:
“Hi, I’m having a (for want of a better phrase) a Terrible Twos Day. Therefore, please give me space, as you may well witness a mini-meltdown, or be on the receiving end of an unnecessary comment. I make no excuses for myself. But I think it’s a lot healthier to let you know, than for you to think you’ve done something to really piss me off, or that I’m in long term distress. I’d tell you if that was the case, and it isn’t. I give you both my apology and my thanks.”
So, did curiosity kill this cat?
No.
My curiosity took me from Huxley and the language of his time, which caught my attention for its difference and its juxtaposition of unusual pairings, to children’s single-minded pursuit of their needs, to 2-year-old Tia’s Terrible-Twos-day. This got me thinking about our adult advantage over Tia, our abilities with language, about voicing our Terrible Twos before they seep out into our working day and cause us and others harm. It may feel uncomfortable to begin with to speak honestly but the long-term gain over short term embarrassment can’t be underestimated.
Huxley was right about children, and in exercising your emotional honesty at work you are also exercising some of that clarity and indeed ruthlessness in voicing your own Terrible-Twos.
Did curiosity kill the cat? No.
photo: La Caminante de Luna
Sculpture in Niki de Saint Phalle's Giardino dei Tarocchi (Portugal)