The beauty of living with wonder and curiosity

By Dylan Jade Rackley

I have always gathered.

Not things. Not status. Knowledge — the kind that changes how you see, not just what you know. I pick it up everywhere. From a research paper and from a conversation at a bus stop. From watching how fungi spread through soil, and from watching how people move through grief. It all goes in. It all connects.

If I'm honest, it didn't start from a pure place. For a long time, gathering was also about wanting to be seen as someone worth knowing. Someone whose presence added something. I wanted the knowledge to make me legible to a world that often looked straight through me.

But something shifted. The gathering stopped being about proof and became just — who I am. The wanting quieted. The curiosity stayed.

This is how I survive.

Not by having fewer burdens than other people. I have many. Some I was born with. Some the world assigned to me. Some arrived without warning and stayed. I don't carry them gracefully every day. Some days I carry them badly, and that is also true.

But underneath all of it — underneath the hard years and the harder months — there is something that has never gone quiet. A genuine interest in how things work. Why systems fail. How people find their way. What holds communities together when everything else pulls them apart.

And then there are people.

Every person I encounter carries something I don't have access to. A life I haven't lived. A way of seeing that formed under completely different pressure. I don't need to agree with someone to find them worth understanding. I don't need them to be kind to me, or educated in the ways the world measures education, or aligned with my politics or my faith or my way of moving through the world. The value is already there before any of that. It doesn't have to be earned.

This is not naivety. Some interactions are genuinely hard. Some people make themselves difficult to be with. But if I look for the human first — before the attitude, before the politics, before the history between us — I usually find a reason to stay present. And staying present is where everything useful happens.

But it isn't only people.

I am moved by how humans build. Not just what gets built, but the thinking behind it — the problem someone held in their hands for years until they found the elegant way through. There is real beauty in a thing that works and is also lovely to look at. In the joint that fits perfectly. The system that holds under pressure. The sentence that carries exactly the weight it needs to carry and no more. When something is crafted well — truly well — I feel it. It's a kind of evidence. Evidence that humans, at their best, are capable of extraordinary things. And that keeps me going on the days when humans, at their worst, are doing their level best to prove otherwise.

And when I find something worth knowing — a framework, a pattern, a way through — I share it. Not to be seen anymore. Just because that's what you do with something valuable. You pass it on. In a conversation, in a classroom, in a meeting, that could have been an email, in whatever form the moment allows. Teaching is just another kind of gathering, except the currency flows the other way.

I don't think wonder is a luxury. I think it's infrastructure. It's the thing that keeps the lights on when nothing else does. You can be exhausted and still curious. You can be grieving and still notice something beautiful in how a problem folds open. These things coexist. I know because I live in both at once.

I am not who I am despite the weight I carry. I am who I am because I kept asking questions while I carried it. And because I kept looking at the people around me — really looking — and finding something worth finding. And because somewhere along the way, I stopped needing them to find it in me first.

That's the whole philosophy, really. Stay curious about the world. Stay curious about the people in it. Keep looking even when looking is hard. And when you find something good, give it away.

It's not easy. But it's mine. And some days, it's enough.