Curiosity – a five element acupuncturist’s most important quality

I have always maintained that one of the qualities we must develop in ourselves as five element acupuncturists is being curious about other people (and about ourselves).  Without this, we will never be able to help our patients.  A lack of curiosity is evidence that we are not really looking at them with the depth of interest we need to have to see them as they are.

I was glad to have my belief in the importance of this quality confirmed by something I read in the newspaper today.  A reader wrote the following:  “There are many reasons why we should cherish Albert Einstein.  What a pity then that biographer Steven Gimbel (about whose book there was a review in the Guardian on 13 June) omitted one of the greatest: curiosity.  Einstein is quoted as referring to this important disposition on several occasions, asserting:  “I have no special talent.  I am only passionately curious.”  Perhaps it was curiosity that led this patent clerk to become such a great physicist, and perhaps it is curiosity that our schools should cherish, rather than testing and league tables.”  (Quoted from the Guardian readers’ letter page today, 19 June).

Oh, how I agree with that!  Perhaps I, too, have “no special talent”.  But I am certainly “passionately curious.”  And it is this curiosity which leads me to explore every more deeply the world of the elements within each of us.