The Curious Life

On Language, Attention, and the Distance Between Us

Photo by 도훈 이 on Unsplash

One of the things that stayed with me after my recent conversation with poet, educator, and Salem Poet Laureate J.D. Scrimgeour was not a discussion about poetry itself.

It was a conversation about language.

J.D. spoke about the experience of writing in Chinese, even while wrestling with questions of fluency, ethics, and belonging. I found myself sharing my own complicated relationship with French and Haitian Creole, languages that have shaped my life in different ways. Together, we circled a question that felt much larger than language:

What keeps us from trying?

The obvious answer is embarrassment.

We don’t want to sound foolish.
We don’t want to get it wrong.
We don’t want to reveal how much we don’t know.

But the more I sat with our conversation, the more I wondered if something else is happening.

We are living through a strange moment in human history. We have unprecedented access to one another. We can communicate across continents in seconds. We can translate languages instantly. We can learn about cultures, communities, and experiences that previous generations might never have encountered.

And yet, despite all this access, we often seem less curious about one another.

We know more about people than ever before, but we seem less willing to know people deeply.

Somewhere along the way, access became a substitute for curiosity.

We scroll past lives we do not understand.
We form opinions before asking questions.
We categorize before we become interested.

And increasingly, our attention seems drawn toward whatever is already receiving attention. Something becomes worthy of our curiosity only after it has gone viral, gained recognition, or been validated by the crowd.

But curiosity does not work that way.

Curiosity may be our most natural state. Left alone, it tends to grow. What concerns me is how often we interrupt it.

It begins with the willingness to move toward something we do not yet understand.

That is what struck me about our conversation on language.

To learn another language, even imperfectly, is to acknowledge that another person’s experience exists beyond the boundaries of our own. It is a way of saying: I don’t expect you to come all the way toward me. I’m willing to meet you somewhere in the middle.

The same is true of friendship.

The same is true of community.

The same is true of poetry.

None of them begin with expertise.

They begin with attention.

And perhaps that is what the poetic life asks of us, not simply to notice the world, but to remain curious about it long enough to discover something we did not already know.

Because attention notices.

Curiosity lingers.

And sometimes the distance between those two things is the distance between merely seeing another person and truly meeting them.

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This reflection emerged from my recent conversation with J.D. Scrimgeour on It’s a Poetic Life.

If you’d like to hear the full conversation, listen to Episode 4: Where the Poet Meets the World: Writing, Teaching, and Creative Community, a conversation about language, literary citizenship, teaching, mentorship, community building, and the many ways poetry continues to gather people together.

In practice, not perfection,

Enzo