There is a constant force within us—something like a pull, an inclination alluring us toward the land spread beyond the bridge, a land concealed by a thick velvet haze. This is not the familiar terrain that has already been braved, judged, and settled as home; rather, the veiled place across the bridge is where things might appear and challenge the solidity of the land upon which I founded this homeworld of mine. The bridge is not a passage; rather, it is a threshold, and like every threshold, it demands that I leave something behind: the longing for familiarity, the passion to be ‘right’. To address the unsettling appetency for revealing what lies concealed beyond the bridge, one must become unmoored from the hook of certainty that anchors the sense of home. And this is the nature of discovery: not to conquer but to surrender!
Curiosity as that constant ‘desire’ to move toward the unknown and taking the risk of getting lost in the windy and foggy unpaved tracks of the highlands or even being stuck in the muddy puddles of the lower plains is not only a mental itch. Curiosity can be described as a mode of ‘directedness’ to the world, an attention to the open horizon of possibilities at hand, lying in front of us concealed with a thick blanket of haze. As far as this directedness is concerned, the allure comes from the open horizon of possibilities that accompanies every already-known, being discovered and constituted object of our world of attention. So, this is not like the magic of a sorcerer passively tempting us to cross the gates of our home to the foreign lands of mystery; rather, curiosity turns us into seekers, actively seeking the invisible threads of possibilities in order to constitute them as actualities holding an open horizon of new possibilities at hand.
Putting it in a temporal language, curiosity entails a future-oriented directedness. The constant seeking intentionality, charged with anticipation of something to be discovered, the living tension between the ‘future possibility’ to become a ‘present fulfilment’ and, almost immediately flows into the past and assimilated ‘as a memory of a constituted actuality’. Therefore, we can explain that the ‘joy of discovery’ lies in the dynamic temporal structure of the configuration of HOPE: moving from ‘Anticipation to Arrival’.
When discussing joy, we might suggest an embodied presentation of the dynamic of anticipation and arrival, a vitality affect or, in Stern’s (….) words, the ‘felt-sense of aliveness’. Curiosity can be felt as pulses through the body, shifting the whole posture toward a destination with a racing heart and sharpened attention, feeling ecstatic and somehow disorienting. Arrival and discovery might be felt as being ‘touched by the unknown’, a feeling of ‘dis-comfort’ within the encounter of the world anew. In the flow of anticipation to arrival, the dynamic of actualisation of a possibility in the horizon of the configuration of hope, the world discloses itself to us in a new manner and touched by this newness and unfamiliarity, we become more and more ‘worlded’, we become unfamiliar to us as we go through these new manners of worldliness. In this sense, the world is not a container of facts to be discovered or even a scene of an unveiling of pre-existing objects; rather, becoming ‘worlded’ is to actively participate in the way ‘being’ lets itself be seen, and I’’ let to be touched by it, ‘I’ to be shaped by it even if the anxiety of unfamiliarity of the newly visible me might feel crippling!
To be Continued….