On curiosity and collecting.
Along with information overload, I tend to go down rabbit holes. Some holes are genuinely fun. Others turn out to be a waste of time, though I usually don’t know which kind I’m in until I’ve already lost a few months. I’d like to think the rabbit holes are a form of education. I do learn quite a lot going down them. Whether any of it applies to real life is another story entirely.
The projects collect. That’s the part that gets me. Every rabbit hole produces a project, and every project joins the pile, and eventually I’m standing in front of the pile unable to pick one and not moving at all. Freeze up. Classic Resistance, dressed up as curiosity. But I’m not ready to say the rabbit holes are the problem.
There’s something genuinely alive about that feeling at the top of a new hole. The wondering what’s down there. The sense of curiosity that pulls you through one tunnel and into the next. I go in and I keep going because each turn reveals something worth knowing, and the learning feels good in a way that’s hard to talk a person out of. Sometimes I surface after a few months. Sometimes it takes a couple of years. I blink and it’s a different season and I have three new shelves of books and a Facebook group and opinions about things I’d never heard of before I fell in.
Take the topic of wood ash glaze. Simple enough starting point. I collect ash from the stove, sift out the chunks outside with a mask on, and inside of an afternoon I’m researching safer sifting methods. Which leads to a book on ash glazes. Which leads to a few books. Which leads to test tiles, then mixing my own, then six Facebook groups where we share results and ask questions about results. Someone posts a surface technique that catches my eye and the next thing I know I’m watching YouTube videos and thinking about making a hundred pots that way. By the time I come up for air there’s a small shelf dedicated to ash glaze alone. Then I see a slab-built raku piece and the whole thing starts over.
I wonder sometimes if boundaries would help. Set a rule, finish one hole before starting the next, something like that. But then I think about what might have gone unexplored and the boundaries start to feel like loss. Maybe the rabbit holes are just how some people are built. Maybe curiosity without a fence on it is the feature, not the bug. The trick might not be stopping the holes but getting better at surfacing, taking what I learned, putting it on a shelf in order, and picking the next right project from the pile instead of freezing in front of it. I’m still working that part out.
Do you jump down rabbit holes? I’d genuinely like to know. Leave a comment and tell me where yours have taken you.
If I were living yesterday a second time: Not to cut the learning short. Just to have a time to come up for air and decide if I wanted to keep going or move on.
Things I am grateful for: A brain that still gets excited about what might be around the next corner.
If I get to live to be 86, I might only have: 12,677 days left. A good number of them have been spent underground in one tunnel or another. I’m not sure I’d change that.
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