Your words were beautiful and challenging.
How to Be More Curious: The Art of Paying Attention
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Time to read 12 min
-The world is constantly broadcasting extraordinary things. The question is whether you have your notifications turned on.
Someone said something recently that stopped me cold. They said that real life is like the For You Page on Instagram or TikTok. That the world has this ultimate algorithm, constantly serving up astonishing, beautiful, strange, and profound things, and most people just scroll right past them without registering what they saw.
I heard that and thought… yes. That is exactly it. That is the thing I have never been able to put into words.
And then I thought about where I came from, and how the whole thing started, and I realized I have been training my algorithm my entire life without knowing that is what I was doing.
Small Place, Enormous World
I grew up in Whortonsville, North Carolina. Size: teeny Population: eensie weensie. No stoplights. One stop sign. One tiny store. The nearest Mexican restaurant was a revelation I did not encounter until high school and I remember sitting there with chips and salsa in front of me, thinking, what is even happening right now, and where has it been my whole life. I had the same experience with Chinese takeout. Like, what is this sweet orange sauce we are dipping these fluffy chicken nuggets into? This experience repeated itself every single time the world handed me something I had not known existed.
And food is its own portal into this, once you start pulling the thread. We think of tomatoes as the soul of Italian cuisine, something ancient and Mediterranean and essentially Italian. But tomatoes are from South America. They did not arrive in Europe until the sixteenth century, carried by Spanish traders, and Italians were deeply suspicious of them for generations before they became inseparable from the culture. The thing we consider most essentially Italian did not exist there four hundred years ago. Every cuisine is really just a record of contact, trade, curiosity, and adaptation. You guys, every dish is a history lesson.
But here is the thing about Whortonsville that took me a long time to understand… There was nothing small about it. The church I grew up in has stained-glass windows, a tradition that traces back through medieval Europe, all the way to ancient Egypt and Rome, right there in a tiny coastal North Carolina town. The cemetery across the street has a gravestone with a Celtic knot relief on it, connecting that southern country soil and those briny creek banks to something ancient and global. On a winter boat ride with an old friend who has since passed, we pulled up on the shore of the creek Whortonsville sits on and found pottery sherds in the mud. I sent photographs to one of my anthropology professors. He dated them to approximately five hundred years old, artifacts from the Native Americans who lived on that land before European contact ever reached it.
Those sherds are in a shadow box in my living room right now.
That is what I mean when I say the ordinary is only ordinary from a distance. Everything has a story that goes so much further back than you can see standing right in front of it.
-The depth was always there.
I just had to learn to look for it.
The Algorithm Rewards Curiosity
Here is what makes the For You Page metaphor so precise… A For You Page is not random. It learns from you. The more you engage, the more it shows you things calibrated to your interests, your patterns, the shape of your mind. It rewards attention. It compounds.
Real life works exactly the same way. The more you notice, the more there is to notice. Curiosity is not a fixed trait you either have or do not have. It is a practice, a muscle you build, a frequency you tune yourself to. And once you are on that frequency, you cannot turn it off.
I do not just want to know what happened. I want to know why. I do not want to know what a culture eats. I want to know what that food means, where it came from, and what it says about how those people understood the world. I do not want to make small talk. I want to skip straight to the part where we talk about the universe and our place in it.
Forget the weather or what you do for work. Tell me what you think happens when you die. Do you believe in ghosts? Reincarnation? Will there be tacos? Do you think Heaven is a singular place or does everyone arrive at their own version of it? That is my small talk. I understand if you need a minute…
I have wonderful memories of the church I grew up in, but I do remember asking a follow-up question in Sunday school, somewhere around middle school age, something that did not quite add up to lived reality. I was told to hush. And I sat there genuinely baffled, not because I was trying to be difficult, but because no one around me had seemed to think to ask it in the first place. I have been asking follow-up questions ever since. If something can fall apart after one follow-up question, where do you go from there?
I still do not fully know what sparked it. Maybe it was just wiring. Maybe it was restlessness. I just know something in me could not leave it alone. We did not have internet. Lord have mercy, we were so far “down the county,” we didn’t even have cable. I had not yet seen much of the world. But something in me already knew there was more, and kept pressing toward it.
The First Time the World Got Enormous
I traveled to Europe in high school, and it did something to me that I do not think I could have anticipated. In America, we call something old when it was built in the 1700s. A colonial-era house, a Revolutionary War battlefield, these feel ancient to us because they are the oldest things in our frame of reference. But standing in Europe, you realize that the frame of reference is embarrassingly narrow. We visited the Louvre in Paris, where we saw artifacts from truly ancient civilizations. We explored a Swiss castle in the Alps built 800 years ago. We climbed the steps of a Roman amphitheatre and went inside an aqueduct along the Mediterranean. Structures built two thousand years ago, still standing, still legible as a feat of human engineering and ambition, and you can put your hands on it. That is not old in the way an antique is old. That is old in a way that bends your sense of time entirely.
That trip did not create my curiosity so much as confirm it, and give it somewhere enormous to run. It showed me that the thing I had been chasing my whole life in Whortonsville, that sense that there is always more underneath, was available everywhere, in every direction, in every culture and era and corner of the earth I had not yet seen.
-The world did not get interesting when I left home. It was always interesting. Leaving home just showed me how vast the interesting was.
The Luck of Being Here at All
I was watching a show recently, set in 800 AD, a battle between the Saxons and the Danes. Watching a man die on screen, I had this thought that hit me like something physical… That is a whole lineage, gone. Every person who would have descended from him, every life that would have been lived, every love story and grief and ordinary coffee run on a Tuesday morning, erased in one moment on a muddy field over a thousand years ago.
And somehow, impossibly, OUR ancestors made it. All of them. Every single one in the long chain going back to whenever human beings first started being human beings. Through famines and plagues and battles and winters that should have killed them. They made it long enough to have children, and those children made it, and eventually, through some extraordinary sequence of survival and chance and probably a lot of stubbornness, here you are. Here I am.
You did not earn that. Neither did I. It is just staggering luck. And when I think about how many potential lives were never lived, how many whole lineages were snuffed out before they ever got to become anything, I feel this overwhelming sense that I have no choice but to try. To be here. To pay attention. To not waste the extraordinary improbability of being alive at all.
Life can be brutally hard. I am not saying it is not. But even in the hard, there is the fact of the thing itself, the gift of being a conscious creature in a world this strange and beautiful and deep. That feels like something worth protecting.
Why I Cannot Just Pick a Lane
People have been telling me for forever to niche down. Pick a style. Pick a subject. Build the algorithm. Be the dog portrait person or the botanical illustration person or the quote art person.
I have never been able to do it, and I used to feel vaguely guilty about that, like it was a lack of discipline or focus. But I understand now that it is the opposite. My inability to niche down is not a creative flaw. It is a direct expression of the same thing that makes me incapable of boredom.
I paint florals and folk art and dogs and food and lettering and nautical scenes because all of it is connected if you look closely enough. A magnolia growing in coastal North Carolina and a geometric pattern from Appalachian craft and a symbol repeated across a dozen ancient cultures and the rug I found thrifting at Goodwill one afternoon and could not stop staring at are all part of the same conversation. That rug became a painting. That painting became one of my best sellers. I thought it would never sell. I made it anyway because I was being pulled toward it and I have learned, slowly, to trust the pull.
Thoreau said it better than I can… “It is not what you look at that matters, it is what you see.” And also this, which gives me literal chills every time I read it…
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
I could honestly quote Walden for the rest of this essay and never run out of moments that make me put the book down and stare at the ceiling. If you have never read it, consider this your sign. The lines that follow this one, about castles in the air and putting foundations under them, still have had me in a chokehold. Thoreau was a man who understood that the life most people are living is not the only available option, and he said so with a kind of quiet fury that still feels radical.
My art is the feed. It is what happens when you let the real-life For You Page run without interference, when you stop trying to control what comes through and start trusting what you are being shown.
This Is Not About Being Special. It Is an Invitation.
I think many people were simply never given permission to go deeper. School rewards memorizing over questioning. Certain environments make asking "why" feel like a challenge rather than a gift. And sometimes, when you ask the question in Sunday school and someone tells you to hush, you learn that curiosity is not safe, and you put it away. That is not a character flaw. That is a reasonable response to being discouraged.
But I want to tell you that it is not too late. The broadcast is still on. It never stopped.
What is the worst that happens if you try something you have never tried? You find a cuisine you love that you would have gone your whole life without. You listen to music you’ve never considered and end up with a better playlist. You notice a pattern that sends you down a two-hour spiral of research about ancient textiles and come out the other side knowing something you did not know before. You ask the question no one around you is asking and find out that the answer is far more interesting and gives you a deeper, fuller appreciation than the official version.
-What is the best that could happen? You start to see opportunities everywhere, rather than thinking they are for other people. You start to change your mind when new information arrives, which is one of the most radical and underrated things a human being can do.
And listen, I ain't immune to this either. I can be a stubborn old goat when something challenges what I have always held to be true. The older I get, the more I have to actively remind myself that a new piece of information bumping up against a long-held belief is not a threat. It is the whole point. It means the algorithm is still working. The day I stop being willing to be wrong about something is the day I stop being curious, and that is the thing I am most afraid of losing. Because stubbornness dressed up as conviction, the refusal to hold two thoughts at once or see the world in anything other than black and white, has caused more damage in this world than almost anything else.
Be a weirdo. Be curious. Ask the follow-up question. Try the restaurant. Book the trip. Notice the rug. The more you know, the more you realize how much you do not know, and that is not a discouraging thought. It is an exciting one!
And none of this requires you to leave. You do not have to book a flight, move to a city, or reinvent your life to find what I am talking about. Curiosity is not a passport. Success is not necessarily measured by how far you go or how much you accumulate. You can live quietly, in a small place, with a small circle, and still be fully, completely alive to the world. The goal is not a bigger life. It is a more alive one.
-Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. — Robert Frost
Fall in love with learning. Fall in love with not knowing yet. Fall in love with the fact that somewhere out there is a piece of information, or a flavor, or a view, or a conversation, that is going to change the way you see everything and make you more grateful for all of it. Not in a vague, passive way, but in the way that stops you mid-bite and makes you think about the centuries-long journey that put that flavor on your tongue, or makes you stand in front of a painting in your own living room and feel genuinely lucky to be alive in a world that contains it. Curiosity does not just open the world. It makes you fall in love with it. And a person who is truly in love with the world is very difficult to discourage.
-The real-life For You Page never stops broadcasting. Your notifications are on. All you have to do is practice the art of paying attention.
Your Turn: What is something you have always been curious about but talked yourself out of? A place you have never been. A cuisine you have never tried. A question you were told not to ask. A road you keep driving past. Drop it in the comments. I want to know.
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Author - Audra Sampson
We create homewares and accessories from our studio in New Bern, NC. Here on the blog, I share what I'm learning about running a creative business, motherhood, and figuring out life as a Gen X woman.
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