ohJust enough, it was an overwhelming amount of hate that landed me on a cross-country trip across America. I didn’t take a sabbatical to go into nature or work remotely in mountaintop forests. Instead, I spent 12 months living out of my refurbished Prius, showering at Planet Fitness, and meeting people who seemed different to me. Venturing out of the liberal stronghold of San Francisco, my journey on the road took me to places like a Trump rally in Minnesota and a convent with Catholic nuns and millennials.
I’m a progressive, queer, Asian-American guy who often dresses flamboyantly – my favorite outfit is a colorful floral suit. So you can imagine that when some of my friends heard about my plans, they said they were worried about my safety. They asked me if I was going to bring a knife or pepper spray for protection. After all, I would meet people who considered them the “enemy”.
Honestly, I shared some of their fears. I had stereotypical views about people on “the other side”. Aren’t Trump voters uneducated, hate-fueled, and hostile to people like me? Would Catholic nuns think I’m unholy because I’m gay?
On the other hand, I knew deeply what it meant to be reduced to assumptions based on who I loved or what I looked like. My Asianness meant I had a Tiger mother, excelled in math and was soft spoken. People shouted “ching chong” at me and asked where I was really from. When people held these caricatures of me, I felt deeply unseen and unappreciated. They knew very little about the story of who I really am.
This otherness, fueled by what I call an “age of curiosity” where we refuse to turn to each other to foster understanding and relationships, drives one of the most pressing issues of our time: division and disconnection. This is something I have explored and written about as the Bridging Differences Fellow at the University of California Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. And unfortunately, this issue is global in its reach. The rift between families and communities due to politics or social identities has found its way into the UK, fueled by the aftermath of Brexit – and research shows that hostility between groups is getting worse.
For us in America, our Brexit breakout moment was the 2016 presidential election. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that one in six people had ended a relationship of some kind because of irreconcilable differences sparked by the election. If it’s not politics that breaks us, it’s vaccines, a geopolitical crisis abroad, age divisions or gender rights.
Through my research, I learned that there is a powerful tool that can help us bridge these differences and forge more meaningful connections with one another. It’s something we’re all fortunately born with, but perhaps don’t practice in an intentional way: curiosity.
Defined as the search for understanding, curiosity is often thought of as just an intellectual pursuit, a way for us to extract information. It fuels our midnight Wikipedia rabbit holes about Taylor Swift or puts us on a fact-finding mission to identify every tree in our neighborhood.
But curiosity is also heart-centered, one that stirs our soul, used to explore our inner world, like how we got hurt or what really matters to us in life. Therapists encourage clients to reflect on their emotions and relationships. We use curiosity to better understand our loved ones and even strangers at the grocery store. Questions like “What is the story of your name?” or “Can you tell me about your grandparents?” unlock the kind of stories filled with rich insights that help us truly see and appreciate the person we’re interacting with.
What I’ve found is that when you approach people with curiosity—even those with very different political views or religious beliefs than yours—you’re less likely to put them on the defensive. By getting to know who they are as an individual, independent of their group identities or affiliations, you begin to humanize them in ways that counter the stereotypes you once held.
This is exactly what happened to me at the Trump rally. A man who voted for Trump, who was an optometrist and did mission trips, told me that LGBTQ+ people deserve equality too – even though I cringed at his use of “the gays” to describe our community. I met another man who said his girlfriend was a Democrat, and although he loved her, he felt ostracized by her friends.
“I’ll hang out with them, and I just know they think I’m stupid,” he said. Although he didn’t say it directly, I could tell he felt hurt by their judgment. I could see his humanity shine through. This man was hurt and felt different, just like me.
Throughout the day and evening, I met dozens of Trump voters who nuanced my understanding of who “they” were. I realized that they are not just a single monolithic group. Some of them believed in climate change. Others were parents. Many valued the same things I did: family, service and belonging. By talking, they became less scary to me. Each time it became a less anxiety-inducing endeavor.
The same was true when I traveled to a convent where a group of Catholic sisters lived with five millennials as part of a six-month residency called Nuns and Nones. The term “none” was coined to describe a growing number of people who seek spiritual meaning in their lives but are not affiliated with a religion in the traditional sense. One of those nothings, Sarah, says there is something powerful about dodging neat categories and staying on the edge, the borderlands, between traditions.
The average age of a Catholic sister in the United States is close to 80, and less than 1% is under 40. Side by side, the nuns and the sisters looked worlds apart. Buzz cuts, velvet shirts and tattoos on one side; gray hair, purple flowers and aged hands on the other side.
One of the defining moments at the Nuns and Nones dormitory between them was a discussion salon with the vow of chastity. The salons involved sitting together in a circle for hours and sharing thoughts, personal experiences and questions.
Sarah expressed her initial resistance to the word chastity. She said the term has a negative connotation and history – a tool to exert power over women, control their bodies and suppress their sexuality. The sisters nodded their heads, indicating that they understood where she was coming from. As the sisters elaborated on the vow from their perspective, Sarah took in their stories and learned about their relationship to femininity and the divine.
Sarah’s preconceived notions about chastity began to unravel—just as my assumptions had at the Trump rally—and she began to see the vow of chastity in a more expansive way. Taking a lifelong vow meant that the sisters’ love (and time and energy) could extend beyond a single romantic partner or their immediate family and go into the service of the underserved or marginalized – or even ‘ a group of millennials who arrived at their doorsteps in a Subaru.
I didn’t just use curiosity on the road across clear divides like politics and religion. There were also many dinners with people much younger or older than me – just as enlightening as we are becoming much more generationally separated with young people at school, adults at work and elderly in nursing homes or retirement communities.
By the end of my cross-country road trip, I had logged thousands of miles in my Prius and the great takeaway from my experiences was that at the heart of the division and disconnection so rampant around the world is a lack of curiosity. When we turn away from each other, we operate from assumptions and biases. We are more likely to dehumanize a group, which makes it easier for us to fear or hate those people.
If we instead choose to turn to each other with curiosity, it becomes a powerful force for understanding and connection. And luckily for everyone, you don’t have to jump into a decade-old Prius to practice this skill with others. You can deepen your practice with curiosity in a conversation with your neighbor who has opposing political views to yours, your colleague with whom you conflict at work, or your child who is going through a struggle you have never experienced before not. You can challenge your assumptions, ask them questions like “tell me more,” and be willing to be transformed by what you learn.
Society will continue to grapple with crisis after crisis and while we cannot control these things, we can harness the superpower of deep curiosity to better navigate them. It not only has the power to transform our lives – it can truly change the world. The next time the rug is pulled out from under you, don’t hide. Instead, I ask you to search.
Search: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World by Scott Shigeoka is published by Bluebird at £16.99. Buy it at guardianbookshop.com for £14.95
