Seek

Seek Plot Summary

Introduction

It was a frigid winter afternoon in Montana as I stood at the edge of a small town diner, watching strangers engage in animated conversation. What struck me wasn't just their passionate exchange of ideas, but how they leaned in toward each other despite their obvious differences – a young woman with vibrant blue hair and tattoos nodding intently as an elderly rancher in worn overalls shared his story. They weren't just hearing words; they were genuinely seeking to understand each other's worlds. In that moment, I witnessed the transformative power of curiosity in action – not as a mere intellectual exercise, but as a bridge between seemingly disparate lives. In an era marked by division and disconnection, our ability to remain curious about ourselves and others has never been more critical. Yet true curiosity – the kind that transforms relationships and lives – requires more than just asking questions. It demands vulnerability, openness, and a willingness to let go of our certainties. Through compelling stories and research-backed insights, we'll explore how deep curiosity can help us navigate difficult conversations, strengthen relationships across differences, heal from personal wounds, and find meaning in challenging times. This journey isn't always comfortable, but by embracing curiosity as a practice, we can move beyond surface-level interactions toward genuine connection and personal transformation.

Chapter 1: The Power of Curiosity: Beyond Survival and Learning

John Jones was only seven years old when he was forced into the Alberni Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Like thousands of other Indigenous children in Canada, he was separated from his family and community as part of a devastating government policy. At the school, Jones endured horrific abuse. Staff forbade children from speaking their native languages, physically punished them for bedwetting, and subjected them to verbal degradation – calling them "dirty, stupid Indians." Sexual abuse was rampant, with Jones himself falling victim to a supervisor who was later convicted of abusing eighteen children. As a child, Jones wrote letters to his mother about his suffering, but she never responded. Years later, he learned the school had intercepted his letters; they never reached her. The trauma of this experience followed Jones throughout his life, part of a systematic campaign that affected over 150,000 Indigenous people in Canada. The last of these schools closed as recently as 1998, a shocking reminder of how current this history truly is. This tragic history reveals something fundamental about human connection: at the root of such atrocities lies dehumanization – the stripping away of someone's inherent dignity. When people are devalued, seen as less than fully human, it becomes easier to mistreat them without remorse. Psychologists Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske found that we're less likely to consider the emotions of those we devalue. When we don't acknowledge someone's emotional experience, it transforms how we treat them, creating psychological justification for inhumane acts. Though most everyday interactions don't reach such extremes, we devalue others in subtle ways throughout our daily lives – staying glued to our phones while someone shares something personal, ignoring service workers, or making assumptions about people based on limited information. These seemingly small acts erode our connections and contribute to the wider social fractures we experience. Curiosity, by contrast, invites us to see the full humanity in ourselves and others, creating the foundation for genuine understanding and connection.

Chapter 2: Diving Deep: From Shallow to Transformative Curiosity

Eight years after my father's death from cancer, I found myself standing on a makeshift stage outside Litla-Hraun, Iceland's largest prison. I was hosting an artist residency, and we'd planned to perform inside, but a last-minute complication forced us to stay thirty meters from the prison walls. We used car headlights to illuminate our makeshift stage and saw the silhouettes of incarcerated men appearing in the glow of prison windows. With microphone in hand, I began reading a poem I'd just written about my father's incarceration – a piece that would unexpectedly become a vehicle for my own healing. Days earlier, two artists in our residency had proposed collaborating with the men in prison on a performance project. When they asked me to participate by writing something about my dad, I felt nervous. My father had been incarcerated for five years starting when I was ten years old, and died shortly after his release. I still carried unresolved grief about his sentence, our relationship, and his death. I hadn't set foot in a prison since my dad's release. That night, I set out to compose a poem about him. Instead of trying to impress, I approached the task with curiosity. I made a list of questions I still had about my dad and his time in prison. I closed my eyes and visualized memories – both painful and pleasant. I played music that reminded me of him and looked at old photos. Through this process of genuine curiosity, memories, images, and feelings flowed through me, resulting in "Dear Father," an honest piece that helped me process our relationship. This experience became a turning point in how I thought about my father. Before, I had dwelled mainly on the abandonment, addiction, and loss. Through curiosity, I could also remember the beautiful aspects of who he was: the father who built me a treehouse in a mango tree as a refuge from bullies, who made friends easily and treated everyone with dignity, who believed in aliens, taught me chess, and carried me on his shoulders after mini-golf. The father who helped cultivate my own sense of curiosity. Shallow curiosity gives us information – facts, figures, and surface-level knowledge. But deep curiosity leads to transformation. When we approach difficult emotions, relationships, and memories with genuine openness, we create space for healing and new understanding. In these moments of vulnerability, we need to prepare ourselves mentally and emotionally – setting the right conditions for exploration. Like completing a challenging wilderness hike, taking on this kind of inner work requires planning and intention if we want to emerge changed for the better.

Chapter 3: Detaching from Assumptions: Emptying Our Mental Cups

Sarah Jane Bradley wore beautiful turquoise rings on almost all her fingers. With her long brown hair swishing in the air, she danced to peppy music playing over a Bluetooth speaker. This wasn't at a typical house party – it was at Mercy Center in Northern California, a retreat center and convent for Catholic nuns. Sarah was there as part of a six-month residency program called Nuns and Nones, bringing together Catholic sisters and millennials seeking spiritual meaning outside traditional religious institutions. These "nones" – a term describing young people not affiliated with formal religion – looked worlds apart from the sisters. Buzz cuts, velvet shirts, and tattoos contrasted with graying hair, purple floral tops, and aged hands. The sisters were two to three times older than their millennial counterparts, with the average age of a Catholic sister in the United States being close to eighty. Yet they came together around a powerful question: What would happen if they explored community, justice, and spiritual practice together? One pivotal moment in their residency was a series of salons focused on the three vows taken by women religious: chastity, poverty, and obedience. During one session, Sarah expressed her initial resistance to the word "chastity," seeing it as a tool historically used to control women's bodies and suppress their sexuality. The sisters nodded, acknowledging her perspective. Then one sister shared that she still had sexual urges and that taking the vow didn't strip away this part of her humanity. Instead, these desires allowed her to witness and acknowledge her womanhood. As other sisters elaborated, Sarah began to see chastity differently. She realized that for these women, the vow wasn't simply about abstaining from sex or suppressing sexuality out of obedience to institutional power. It was about what one sister called the "deprivatization of love" – directing one's energy beyond a single romantic partner or immediate family toward serving many people, especially the underserved. By letting go of her assumptions, Sarah made room to understand the sisters' perspectives, leading to genuine moments of connection and insight. This story illustrates a parable about a student who visits a teacher asking to learn. The teacher offers tea, filling the student's cup until it overflows. "This is you," the teacher explains. "Your cup is too full. To learn from me, you must first empty your cup." Similarly, when our minds are filled with assumptions, biases, and certainties – what we might call our "ABCs" – we leave little room for new understanding. By detaching from what we think we know, we create space for deep curiosity to take root, allowing us to see ourselves and others with greater clarity and compassion.

Chapter 4: Setting the Stage: Mindset and Environment for Curiosity

When President John F. Kennedy stepped onstage at Rice University in September 1962, he made a bold declaration about sending Americans to the moon. The rocket would be three hundred feet tall, travel 240,000 miles from mission control, and move at more than twenty-five thousand miles per hour – all practically unimaginable at that time. It would withstand temperatures half that of the sun upon reentry, using metal alloys that hadn't even been invented yet. "And it will be done before the end of this decade," he promised the stunned audience. Kennedy wasn't a scientist or engineer. He was someone who, facing fear and uncertainty, invited an entire nation to imagine possibilities and unleash their curiosity. Many believed the goal was impossible – everything needed to happen within an eight-year timeline. But Kennedy understood that the opposite of fear isn't hope; it's curiosity. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things," he told the crowd, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Kennedy was right. In July 1969, a few months before the decade's end, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. It was literally a "moonshot" that proved the power of tackling challenges precisely because they are difficult. This story reminds us that before embarking on any journey of curiosity, we must prepare our mindset and environment. This preparation is similar to what psychonauts – those who explore altered states of consciousness – call "set and setting." Set, or mindset, refers to the attitude and emotions you bring to an experience. Setting involves the context – the place, people, time, and other environmental factors. Research since the 1950s has shown that preparing for a positive experience increases the likelihood of having one. Similarly, without properly preparing our mindset and setting for curiosity, the journey can become challenging or even distressing. By being intentional about how we approach curiosity, we significantly improve our chances of having transformative experiences. When we deliberately set aside time for reflection, create spaces conducive to open conversation, or establish agreements before difficult discussions, we create conditions where deeper understanding can flourish. This intentionality doesn't require elaborate preparation – sometimes it's as simple as taking a few breaths before a conversation or choosing a quiet, comfortable setting to have an important discussion.

Chapter 5: Valuing Humanity: Seeing Dignity in Ourselves and Others

Alua Arthur didn't go to Cuba to die, but she nearly did. While visiting Havana, she stepped off a curb to cross the street when a car nearly hit her, missing by just inches. Heart racing, she composed herself and continued to her destination – the bus station. There, she met a woman with a quill pen tattoo, and they struck up a conversation. They ended up sitting together on the bus. "What brought you to Cuba?" Alua asked, expecting a typical traveler's response. "I have uterine cancer," the woman, named Jessica, replied abruptly. Jessica explained that she had marked six places in the world she wanted to visit before she died, and Cuba was one of them. Unlike others who offered empty reassurances or changed the subject when Jessica mentioned her diagnosis, Alua leaned in with genuine curiosity. She asked about the cancer, Jessica's thoughts on death, and how she felt about her terminal situation. Jessica was eager to share because no one had dared to ask her these questions before. They spent the next fourteen hours talking about cancer, traveling, family, life, and death. That night, Jessica revealed something shocking: "I hope this isn't weird, but remember that car that almost hit you? I was in that car." This profound connection became a turning point in Alua's life. She realized that many people like Jessica didn't have space to talk about death because those around them were too uncomfortable to face it. Yet people who are dying are still people – they want to be seen and heard as their authentic selves. After this encounter, Alua quit her job as an attorney and became a death doula, supporting people at the end of their lives. While she helps with practical matters like advanced directives, her most important function is witnessing and accompanying those who are dying – listening deeply and reflecting back what she hears. Unlike medical professionals focused on physical care, a death doula's role is to be present with the whole person during life's final chapter. "I see the best and worst in people as they die," Alua says. "But more often than not, as people are dying, they become more of themselves." Her approach demonstrates the profound power of valuing others – seeing their inherent dignity even in life's most challenging moments. By approaching people with genuine curiosity and compassion rather than judgment or avoidance, we create space for authentic connection. This practice of valuing humanity – in ourselves and others – forms the heart of deep curiosity, allowing us to move beyond surface-level interactions toward meaningful understanding.

Chapter 6: Embracing Fire Seasons: Finding Growth in Difficult Times

Lily Clarke makes her way up Montana's Swan Valley in a vehicle packed with her wildland fire crew. There's a buildup of anticipation, excitement, and nerves. Static and voices crackle through her radio. Then she sees the smoke billowing into the air, and they come to a stop. They jump out, throw down their gear, suit up, and prepare to fight the wildfire. In the middle of a wildland fire, the extreme heat is immediate. Thick toxic smoke makes visibility difficult through sunglasses. The air is desert-dry. Twin Commander planes fly overhead, dropping thousands of gallons of water. On the ground, a haunting high-pitched whistle echoes through the forest when a tree gets "torched" – erupting in flames. It's a tree's final death scream, and it makes the hairs on Lily's neck stand up every time. Growing up in rural Montana, Lily noticed something about her small town of three hundred people: When the mountains burn, the fire brings a rage that circulates through her community, setting residents aflame in a different way. At town hall meetings and in supermarket gossip, neighbors attack the fire crew. Some call them the "forest circus," criticizing their approach to land management. Others defend the crew, upset by the lack of gratitude. The town's common enemy should be the forest fires, but every fire season, they turn on each other instead. Yet after fire season ends, these same neighbors come together in the burnt landscape with blackened trunks and downed logs. What looks like a lifeless moonscape actually contains islands of vitality – tiny curls of green fern and moss spreading over roots. Most sought-after is the fire morel, a delicious mushroom that appears most abundantly after a forest fire. Mycologists aren't sure exactly why morels suddenly appear after fires. One hypothesis is they're a dying tree's final gasp, pushing its last resources into a new form. Another suggests that fire introduces rich nutrients into the soil. What's clear is that without the blaze, there wouldn't be fire morels – they represent one of the first signs of life returning after a burn. What Lily learned as a firefighter is that we shouldn't fear fires – we should learn to be with them. "When I approach and see the fire, I am in love," she wrote in her journal. "Fire does not have to be something we fear. Even when it's happening it is not just destruction, it is also transformation... the phrase 'fighting fire' never resonated with me, but being with fire does." Life's forest fires – whether a cancer diagnosis, the death of a loved one, job loss, or divorce – can seem to appear out of nowhere, spiraling quickly out of control. In these moments, we often protect ourselves with certainty, making definitive statements like "I'll never find a job as good as that again!" or "I must not have loved my spouse anyway." But these statements mask the truth: these moments are painful and impossible to avoid completely. Rather than running from difficulty, we must learn to sit with and examine the hard things in life, seeing them for all they are – both the destruction and the potential for renewal.

Chapter 7: Knowing Your Limits: When to Pause Your Curiosity

I was a teenager when I did my first major cliff dive in Hawai'i. A massive rock jutted out near the shore, and when water levels were high enough, you could leap twenty feet into the ocean below. Of course, I was trying to impress a high school crush. Our group dropped our towels and sunglasses on the beach and climbed up the rock barefoot, one step after another. At the top, I squeezed through a crowd of high schoolers until I reached the edge, where spectators watched people take the leap. I peered over and thought, Holy shit. It looked much higher from up there than it had from the ground – that moment where imagination meets reality. I watched as others launched themselves off the cliff, some doing fancy flips, most doing simple pencil dives. "Just make sure you jump far enough out so you don't hit the rock on the way down," my friend Erik advised as I prepared to go next. I carefully moved to the edge and looked down at the waves crashing against the cliff. The swimmers below looked tiny. Kids behind me offered encouragement: "You got it, brah. Just go try." I closed my eyes and remembered what I'd learned: Don't fall onto your back or stomach; launch yourself fast and far off the rock; do a pencil dive rather than showing off; take a deep breath; time it with the approaching wave. Looking back, I realize what gave me the courage to jump. I had leaped off diving boards and smaller cliffs before – not as high as this one, but my body knew what it felt like. Growing up around rocks and the ocean made the environment familiar, not alien. Erik reminded me I could pull back if I felt too scared. And rather than attempting a risky backflip, I chose a simple pencil dive. Without knowing it, I had reviewed three crucial questions: Am I the right person to do this? Is this the right time? Do I know when to stop or slow down? Exploring these questions gave me clarity that built my sense of safety and courage to take the leap. These same questions apply perfectly to deep curiosity. Before engaging with difficult topics or challenging relationships, checking our limits and boundaries prevents us from pushing too far too fast. Sometimes we aren't the right person for a particular conversation, or it isn't the right moment, or we need to recognize when to pause. Like cliffs that vary in height, curiosity has different depths, and we must gauge our readiness for each level of engagement. By honoring these boundaries, we create sustainable practices of curiosity that allow for genuine connection without causing harm to ourselves or others.

Summary

Throughout these stories, we've witnessed the transformative power of deep curiosity – not as a mere intellectual exercise, but as a practice that connects us to ourselves, to others, and to life's most profound questions. From John Jones' painful residential school experience to Alua's unexpected connection with Jessica on a Cuban bus, we've seen how valuing the humanity in ourselves and others creates space for healing and understanding. Whether we're detaching from assumptions like Sarah did with the Catholic sisters, setting intentions like Kennedy did with the moonshot, or embracing life's fire seasons like Lily did in Montana's burnt forests, curiosity offers us a path through uncertainty and division. The journey of deep curiosity isn't always comfortable. It asks us to empty our cups of assumptions, to prepare our mindset and environment, to see the dignity in everyone we encounter, and to move toward difficult emotions rather than away from them. It requires us to honor our limits while still being willing to take the leap. But when we commit to this practice, we discover that curiosity is the antidote to fear, the bridge across our differences, and the fire that transforms rather than destroys. In a world that often feels divided and disconnected, curiosity remains our most powerful tool for rediscovering our shared humanity and creating meaningful change – both within ourselves and in the world around us.

About Author

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Scott Shigeoka

Scott Shigeoka is an internationally recognized curiosity expert, speaker, and the author of SEEK: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World. He is known for translating research into strategies that promote positive well-being and connected relationships around the globe, including at the UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and through his groundbreaking courses at the University of Texas at Austin.

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