Curiosity with Stamina

night train window
one question on the glass breath
then the pane clears

I used to think the important thing was answers. Now I think the important thing is the question that keeps walking beside you when the answers fall asleep. Curiosity with stamina. Not the spark that burns out in the first gust, not the marathon without a map, but the two braided into something you can build a life around. Curiosity chooses the door. Stamina keeps turning the handle until it opens.

Once, under the big clock at Zürich Hauptbahnhof, I watched the second hand do its private ritual. It paused. People kept moving. Steam rose from paper cups. A violin practiced something slow. Then the hand jumped, as if time remembered itself. In that small pause the thought arrived: when the scoreboard goes dark—likes, money, applause—what work still calls your name? I didn’t answer. I let the question sit like a coin in my mouth. Metal, specific, a little cold.

I started to notice that questions prefer to travel. They like to ride ferries, sit in coat pockets, hitchhike on receipts. In a bus shelter outside Kobarid, rain slanting sideways, an old man asked me in careful English: “What do you carry that is not yours?” He didn’t look at me after he said it. He folded his hands like someone finishing a prayer and watched the weather spend itself. Months later I found the same sentence written on the back of a tram ticket in Nagasaki. Same letters. Same tilt to the question mark. The ticket was in my coat, but I don’t remember putting it there.

Curiosity with stamina is the willingness to keep such sentences, unpolished, unfiled, somewhere close to the heart—and to keep walking while they work on you.

I protect attention like a candle in wind. The world has learned a thousand ways to blow it out. So I make space that looks empty from the outside. Long walks with no destination. Whole books read at the speed they deserve. Trenches of time where nothing happens until something does. Boredom, it turns out, is the first gate. Most people turn back there. If you stay, the corridor opens.

On the road outside Matsue I learned the shape of that corridor. Rice fields mirrored sky. A crow landed on a scarecrow’s sleeve as if the joke needed a closing line. My steps repeated until they didn’t, until the rhythm changed on its own, like a song finding its key. I came home with nothing to show but the sense that my questions had grown legs stronger than mine.

I try to ask better questions. “Why” is impatient; it rushes the witness. “What if” invites the room to breathe. “Who is to blame” closes the door. “What is missing” opens the window. In a Reykjavik library a child asked me why adults walk faster than children. I said, because we think we know where we’re going. She looked at the ceiling and said, “But we don’t.” The librarian stamped a date and smiled without looking up. I wrote the exchange down because some questions become maps only after you fold them twice.

When the mind gets proud, I bring in the hands. Curiosity must touch wood and metal and soil or it will float away and forget to come back. In Bern my heater died with the logic of a fairy tale: warm, warm, warm, nothing. I opened the panel with a butter knife, found a small city of dust living comfortably where heat used to live, and decided to become a citizen. Three false starts, one cut knuckle, a steadying breath—and the system coughed, complained, agreed. Warmth returned like someone late to dinner, unapologetic, necessary. I didn’t learn everything about heaters. I learned enough to return. Stamina says: again. The hands say: show me.

I’ve learned to teach as a way to check my pulse. Not by sermon. By example, by artifacts. Leaving a slip of paper in a returned book: What did this change in you? Sending a friend a list of the mistakes it took to fix a small thing. Holding open a door and making sure someone sees it’s possible to hold a door and carry your own bags. Teaching is the checksum of learning. If I can’t explain it simply, I don’t own it yet. And when I can, the knowledge leaves me a little cleaner and goes to build itself in someone else.

There is a ruthlessness hidden inside this softness. Not toward people. Toward distractions. I say no to most invitations because attention is more finite than time. I say yes to the unlabeled, the odd corner, the conversation without a business card. Originality rarely wears a lanyard. The market will always reward your average. Your soul will not. Curiosity with stamina says: let the applause pass like weather; build the climate yourself.

Eventually you get lost. That is part of the design. When I am lost I do three things. I move my body until the mind unclenches. I simplify my inputs until the signal grows louder than the noise. I return to the smallest honest step. Wash the cup. Write the sentence. Tighten the screw. Curiosity does not require certainty—only movement. Stamina does not require speed—only return.

There are seasons. Soaking: read, wander, ask naive questions without apologizing. Shaping: choose one line and push it forward until it pushes back. Sharing: open the windows; let other minds blow through. Silence: close the windows; let the dust settle; listen for the next signal. Respect the seasons. Don’t harvest in winter. Don’t sleep through spring.

I keep pocket rules because pockets are where real life happens.

Simple beats clever. Repetition beats intensity. Direction beats speed. Craft beats hype. Time beats talent. Kindness beats cynicism. Curiosity scales. Stamina compounds. If you want a different answer, ask a different question. The only sustainable pace is the one you can keep. Don’t be the best. Be the only. Teach the path you needed last year. Make the tool you wish you had today. Leave room for serendipity to find you working.

What does any of this look like in a day? Wake before the noise decides your mood. Sit until the breathing finds you. Read something older than your grandparents. Walk while your thoughts loosen one knot on their own. Touch the real project before you open the door to the world. Choose one knot you will untie on purpose. Speak to one stranger and ask them something you cannot predict the answer to. Capture one sentence worth keeping. Repair one small object that would otherwise end up in a bin. Eat with the people who know your first story and your latest. Go to bed before you are tired of the day. Rhythm is a kind of freedom that doesn’t need permission.

Sometimes I hear a whistle in places that don’t have whistles. On the ferry between Hakodate and Aomori a woman told me her brother whistled before casting the nets. He didn’t return one winter. “The tune walks by itself now,” she said, and looked at the water as if it had a face. Years later the radiator in a Zagreb hotel whistled three notes at dawn and fell silent. I said, I hear you. No one answered. That is fine. Not all lanterns are for you to carry. Some only pass by to show the path exists.

I keep seeing a small silver object in shop windows across cities. Lisbon. Sapporo. Basel. Smooth, humming without sound, unmarked. Each time I look back it is gone. Curiosity says, name it. Stamina says, let it remain unnamed until it chooses you. Some signals only grow if you stop plucking them for proof.

If you practice this long enough, the edge where you can be the only becomes visible. Not the only like a crown; the only like a fingerprint. Your loop becomes specific. The question you ask better than most. The repair you can do with your eyes closed. The story you can carry without dropping any of its pieces. Greenlights appear more often for the walker who keeps walking; compounding begins to look like luck to anyone who didn’t see the miles.

I value curiosity with stamina because it respects the long now. It refuses rented beliefs. It prefers evidence to volume. It changes its mind without losing its character. It makes room for wonder and then asks wonder to sit at a workbench. Prototype. Ship. Review. Begin again, beginner again, a little braver.

If I could leave my children anything that wouldn’t rot or vanish, it would not be a map. Maps are true until they aren’t. I would leave them a way of traveling: ask, listen, try, return, share, laugh, forgive, keep going. Lose the road and make a small circle with your feet until you feel the earth answer back. That is north enough.

At the end, when the last light lays its hand on the table, I don’t want a staircase of trophies. I want dog-eared notebooks, a chair repaired until it remembers every palm that steadied it, a handful of students who outgrew me, a set of tools that will be useful to strangers I’ll never meet. That is wealth measured in attention, resilience, patience, long-term growth. The kind that does not need guarding. The kind that does not apologize.

Sometimes, late, the kitchen clock repeats the Zürich pause. The second hand hovers. A crow lands on the railing outside and tilts its head as if to listen. Somewhere, faint, three notes whistle and then disappear. In that pocket of stillness I feel the sentence arrive with the precision of a well-cut joint:

Protect your attention. Ask the better question. Touch the work. Teach the path. Walk again.

Then the hand jumps, time resumes, and the day begins like a door you have opened a thousand times and still love for how it fits the hinge.