It’s been a bit over a week. I’ve been wearing my counter ring, and turning it every time I notice something that might be open curiosity.
The first time I ran into “maybe this is open curiosity” was during a chocolate tasting.
Account
I ordered six different brands of single-origin Ecuadorian chocolate, laid them all out, then slowly tasted them one by one while taking notes on my experience of each. I’d break off a piece, paying attention to the sound and feel of the snap. Then I’d bring the piece to my nose and smell it. Then I’d set a one minute timer, let the chocolate melt on my tongue for the whole minute, and finally chew it up. I took notes off and on the whole time.
Here’s a bit from my notes on To’ak’s Rain Harvest 2018 74% dark chocolate. “A little boy climbed into the canopy to harvest flowers from the tallest vines during a rain storm, then brought them down to the dew-covered irises, sprinkled all the petals with clover honey, and brought them to his grandmother who is taking a mid-day nap in a darkened room.”
Whatever it was I did with my mind to generate notes about the flavor had a quality I’m strongly inclined to describe as “open”. There was a feeling like stepping out of the way, letting go of something, or welcoming. If I had to name the something I was letting go of, it might be “making literal sense of things”.
I definitely wasn’t letting go of trying, though. I was being very precise, discarding a lot of description pieces that weren’t quite right. The thing was, I discarded them after considering them, rather than pre-determining what kinds of descriptions were allowed to present themselves. I think it was probably the space of pre-determined answers that was “opening”.
By contrast, I completely failed to do this “open” thing when describing my experiences of snapping the chocolate pieces. I wrote notes like, “snappy little pop” and “crunchy crunchy snap”. By the end I was feeling some combination of dismissive and frustrated about the chocolate textures. Of the last chocolate, I wrote, “I don’t fuckin know, it goes ‘pop’ when i break it. Maybe a little quieter and lower pitched than the others.” I was sort of trying to convince myself that the textures didn’t matter.
Reflections
Although I definitely identified a quality of “openness” in chocolate tasting, it’s much harder for me to recognize “curiosity” in this experience. I’m left feeling very unsure whether there is anything to “open curiosity” beyond “openness”.
If I assume that there is a difference, and that this experience contained “open curiosity” rather than mere “openness”, then I’d guess it has something to do with the frame. I orchestrated the experience with an intention to discover something. I wanted to know what the chocolates tasted like, whether I like Ecuadorian chocolate in general (this was a follow-up to an earlier tasting where I tried chocolates from several different parts of the world and found that my favorite was from Ecuador), what differs among different chocolate manufacturers who start with basically the same beans, and whether the much more expensive brand is of noticeably higher quality than the others (it is).
All of that sort of melted away, though, during the tasting. I intuitively knew that it had to, that if I kept all of those intentions at the font of my mind as I tasted, I’d basically experience what I expected to, in little more detail than my priors already contained. …Which does sound an awful lot like a reasonable distinction between “active curiosity” and “open curiosity”.
If I suppose, though, that there is a difference between “open curiosity” and mere “openness”, and that this was an experience of mere openness without the curiosity, then I’d guess it was missing some kind of question-holding that is “open” rather than “active”. While I was tasting, I was not aware of any interest to learn anything. My whole attention was on close observation of the chocolate and its effect on me as I interacted with it, and on the task of describing those observations in words. And I wonder whether curiosity of any sort requires some kind of question-shaped box that is held in front of you to catch some bits of information, and not others.
So I think that in chocolate tasting, I have at least explored my first question (“How can you tell when you’re experiencing open curiosity vs. something sort of similar that isn’t curiosity at all?”), but I don’t think I have an answer yet.
(1: Chocolate Tasting)
It’s been a bit over a week. I’ve been wearing my counter ring, and turning it every time I notice something that might be open curiosity.
The first time I ran into “maybe this is open curiosity” was during a chocolate tasting.
Account
I ordered six different brands of single-origin Ecuadorian chocolate, laid them all out, then slowly tasted them one by one while taking notes on my experience of each. I’d break off a piece, paying attention to the sound and feel of the snap. Then I’d bring the piece to my nose and smell it. Then I’d set a one minute timer, let the chocolate melt on my tongue for the whole minute, and finally chew it up. I took notes off and on the whole time.
Here’s a bit from my notes on To’ak’s Rain Harvest 2018 74% dark chocolate. “A little boy climbed into the canopy to harvest flowers from the tallest vines during a rain storm, then brought them down to the dew-covered irises, sprinkled all the petals with clover honey, and brought them to his grandmother who is taking a mid-day nap in a darkened room.”
Whatever it was I did with my mind to generate notes about the flavor had a quality I’m strongly inclined to describe as “open”. There was a feeling like stepping out of the way, letting go of something, or welcoming. If I had to name the something I was letting go of, it might be “making literal sense of things”.
I definitely wasn’t letting go of trying, though. I was being very precise, discarding a lot of description pieces that weren’t quite right. The thing was, I discarded them after considering them, rather than pre-determining what kinds of descriptions were allowed to present themselves. I think it was probably the space of pre-determined answers that was “opening”.
By contrast, I completely failed to do this “open” thing when describing my experiences of snapping the chocolate pieces. I wrote notes like, “snappy little pop” and “crunchy crunchy snap”. By the end I was feeling some combination of dismissive and frustrated about the chocolate textures. Of the last chocolate, I wrote, “I don’t fuckin know, it goes ‘pop’ when i break it. Maybe a little quieter and lower pitched than the others.” I was sort of trying to convince myself that the textures didn’t matter.
Reflections
Although I definitely identified a quality of “openness” in chocolate tasting, it’s much harder for me to recognize “curiosity” in this experience. I’m left feeling very unsure whether there is anything to “open curiosity” beyond “openness”.
If I assume that there is a difference, and that this experience contained “open curiosity” rather than mere “openness”, then I’d guess it has something to do with the frame. I orchestrated the experience with an intention to discover something. I wanted to know what the chocolates tasted like, whether I like Ecuadorian chocolate in general (this was a follow-up to an earlier tasting where I tried chocolates from several different parts of the world and found that my favorite was from Ecuador), what differs among different chocolate manufacturers who start with basically the same beans, and whether the much more expensive brand is of noticeably higher quality than the others (it is).
All of that sort of melted away, though, during the tasting. I intuitively knew that it had to, that if I kept all of those intentions at the font of my mind as I tasted, I’d basically experience what I expected to, in little more detail than my priors already contained. …Which does sound an awful lot like a reasonable distinction between “active curiosity” and “open curiosity”.
If I suppose, though, that there is a difference between “open curiosity” and mere “openness”, and that this was an experience of mere openness without the curiosity, then I’d guess it was missing some kind of question-holding that is “open” rather than “active”. While I was tasting, I was not aware of any interest to learn anything. My whole attention was on close observation of the chocolate and its effect on me as I interacted with it, and on the task of describing those observations in words. And I wonder whether curiosity of any sort requires some kind of question-shaped box that is held in front of you to catch some bits of information, and not others.
So I think that in chocolate tasting, I have at least explored my first question (“How can you tell when you’re experiencing open curiosity vs. something sort of similar that isn’t curiosity at all?”), but I don’t think I have an answer yet.