Curiosity is a form of exploration
One of my pleasures is reading to or listening about explorers. Not so much the age of exploration, which strikes me as naive and damaging, but a lot of modern explorers and what they do.
Many people think that exploration means filling in a blank on the map and that, since all the blanks have been filled in, there's nothing left to find. But I think this is quite two dimensional and reductive, a map is just an inaccurate representation of space, but says nothing about the texture of a place. How does it feel being there? Furthermore, maybe we've explored some of the bigger things, but the hyper-local remains elusive. Often I think about places I walk by every day then suddenly notice - how many people in my life have never really seen that building, tree, flower, object? Isn't this a form of exploration?
When I lived with my parents, some point in Uni, I was on a mission to explore as much of the surrounding suburbs as possible. I'd lived, walked, ridden, driven and skateboarded through these places yet there were so many streets I could picture or even think about. What did this place look like? What's down this lane? Where does this street lead? So few people, even those in my family, had seen very much of where we lived. Maybe only 10% of the suburb. That always fascinated me.
When I lived in rural Victoria I couldn't explore much of it, but it was amazing to hop a fence and see where I'd end up. I remember, vividly, one long walk where I ended up hopping over a Primary School and into a citrus farm before following the train tracks all the way home. I didn't see anyone else and it was kind of this hidden secret world all to myself. Of course I'm sure the students and the farmers knew those locations well, but no one I knew did. So in a way I was discovering it for the first time. The farm was just a blank spot on the map, but suddenly when I was there all these huge nets (10-15m high) were just towering over me, totally bizarre amongst the parched red scrub.
Now that I live back in Melbourne I'm less interested in exploring physical spaces. But I think of curiosity as a form of exploration. I'll often say yes to things, just to see what it's like - just to make a Tuesday afternoon a bit more interesting. Recently I went fossiking for fossils, snorkeling and over-turning rocks to see what we'd find. I also went abalone diving. I don't really care about the results - I know what a fossil looks like and what abalone tastes like, but the experience of doing it is the real learning and meaning. Just going somewhere, or seeing that it's mapped, is kind of shallow, isn't it? I like to follow my nose and just let myself be guided, finding weird and wonderful things.
Over the last few years I've ended up sailing, swimming, staying with some off the grid eco warriors, scrambling through the back blocks of Victoria, sifting through the Museums physical specimen archive, climbing out on some of the most epic cliffs I could find, meeting wildlife carers, walking through some Chinese cities, skiing with an old family friend, holding eagles and lots of other things I've forgotten about. I love just being shown around and expanding my experience of life. I think there's something really explorative about being open to these things. A lot of folks wouldn't call this exploration - I'm not discovering anything new at all, but for me it's exactly the same. It's 100% new for me, it's 100% interesting and novel and enriching, so I'm going to call that a form of exploration!