There is a particular kind of person who, well into their years, still leans forward when someone starts a sentence with Did you know…? Their eyes go a little wider. Their coffee gets cold. They forget, briefly, to be tired. I have always loved those people. I have always wanted to be one of them.

Alice Munro, who spent a lifetime writing about the interior weather of ordinary lives, once said it plainly: the constant happiness is curiosity. Not success. Not security. Not the arrival at some long-imagined destination. Curiosity — that persistent, slightly undignified leaning-toward. That refusal to already know.

Why does curiosity keep us young? Not in the cosmetic sense — though I suspect the face of someone genuinely delighted by a question looks younger than the face of someone who stopped asking them. I mean young in the cellular sense. In the neurological sense. The brain, it turns out, does not distinguish very well between a child pressing their nose against a glass case of beetles and a sixty-year-old discovering that her Japanese maple is telling her something new through the colour of its leaves. In both cases, dopamine moves. New connections form. The brain lights up the way it lit up before the world became familiar.

To be curious is to remain, in some essential way, unfinished. And unfinished things grow. Completed things do not.

There is something else, though — something quieter and perhaps more useful to those of us who have spent any time living inside our own heads. When we are genuinely curious, we are pointed outward. We are listening. We are watching. We are wondering what that person really meant, how that plant actually works, what would happen if we tried a different way. And in that outward-pointing state, there is simply no room for the other thing. The loop. The reel of should-have, could-have, why-didn’t-I.

Rumination is what happens when we have no question left. It is the mind turning back on itself because there is nowhere else to go. Curiosity is the open door. Not a distraction from our pain — I want to be careful here — but a genuine alternative architecture for a mind that needs somewhere to move. When I am genuinely wondering about something, I am not, in that same moment, rehearsing my regrets. The two cannot fully coexist. The wondering wins, if we let it.

And then there is the question of creativity — which is, frankly, one of those chicken-and-egg riddles that I have decided I no longer need to solve. Does curiosity make us creative? Or does creativity make us curious? Perhaps the more interesting truth is that they are the same animal, seen from different angles. Curiosity is creativity before it knows what it is making. Creativity is curiosity that found a form.

What I know from my own life — from the garden, from the work, from the long mornings of not-quite-knowing — is this: the moments I felt most creative were also the moments I had stopped insisting that I already understood things. When I looked at the soil not as a problem to solve but as a system to get curious about, things shifted. When I looked at the work of building a community not as a blueprint to execute but as a question to keep asking — what does this person actually need, right now? — something opened.

Creativity is available to the curious. Not as a reward, but as a natural consequence. The open hand receives.

So I come back to Munro’s word: constant. Not occasional happiness. Not happiness under the right conditions. The constant kind — the kind that doesn’t depend on circumstances cooperating. That word is the whole point. Because curiosity, unlike most forms of happiness, is available at almost any moment. All it requires is that we stop, briefly, being certain. That we look at something — anything — and ask I wonder.

You don’t have to be feeling well. You don’t have to have slept. You don’t have to know where you are going. You only have to be willing to not already know the answer to the thing right in front of you. That willingness — small, renewable, endlessly available — might be the most underrated form of resilience I know.

Stay curious, dear changemaker. Not as a productivity strategy, but as a way of being alive — fully, quietly, constantly — in a world that rewards certainty while giving its deepest gifts to those who refuse it.