Curiosity

 Read this on someone else’s Facebook notes, think it’s really inspiring, and gives me the strength to pursue what I want to pursue. Which is life beyond consulting, when everyone else seems to be telling me how risky, how difficult it is.

At the end of the day, that doesn’t scare me. Life is about living and exploring and experiencing the unknown. Living at the bottom of the well is not living at all.

Enjoy. And I hope this inspires you too, to follow a dream.

Curiosity

 

may have killed the cat; more likely

the cat was just unlucky, or else curious

to see what death was like, having no cause

to go on licking paws, or fathering

litter on litter of kittens, predictably.

 

Nevertheless, to be curious

is dangerous enough. To distrust

what is always said, what seems

to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,

leave home, smell rats, have hunches

do not endear cats to those doggy circles

where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches

are the order of things, and where prevails

much wagging of incurious heads and tails.

 

Face it. Curiosity

will not cause us to die–

only lack of it will.

Never to want to see

the other side of the hill

or that improbable country

where living is an idyll

(although a probable hell)

would kill us all.

 

Only th

e curious have, if they live, a tale

worth telling at all.

 

Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,

are changeable, marry too many wives,

desert their children, chill all dinner tables

with tales of their nine lives.

Well, they are lucky. Let them be

nine-lived and contradictory,

curious enough to change, prepared to pay

the cat price, which is to die

and die again and again,

each time with no less pain.

A cat minority of one

is all that can be counted on

to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell

on each return from hell

is this: that dying is what the living do,

that dying is what the loving do,

and that dead dogs are those who do not know

that dying is what, to live, each has to do.

 

— Alastair Reid