Kevin Kelly, the Wired wandering pilgrim of curiosity, culture, technology and spirituality
“Looking back, I see that it was really fundamental curiosity. And, if I examine the people in my lives, the ones that were most influential on me as adult were definitely those who were most curious in their own lives. … But for some reason, I was very interested in new, the frontier, making things that were valuable. And curiosity is just essential. It's the only way, I think, that you arrive at that difference, the new, the novel, the innovation. And there, you absolutely have to be curious all the time. And for some reason, that was the area, that frontier, that edge, that boundary between what we know and what we don't know … that was where I wanted to live. And the travel was an easy way to encounter that boundary, to encounter that difference.”
……
“And I was reading literally all day. I'd get up in the morning, I would just read, read, read, read. I'd have lunch and read until night and then I would read the next day. And I was reading really pretty fast at that point. But I was going along and then I picked up Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which is this sort of poem and ode to America. And while reading it, my gaskets blew. It it filled me with such a desire to see the country, to see the world, to see America, which I again, I'm not seeing it, not in New England. And that was the moment. So, I just said, I have to see, I have to travel and I have to see this myself. I have to experience this.”
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“[Travelling] took hold of me. it was it was like it was a compulsion. It's like they talk about the fear of missing out, was something similar to that. The fear of missing the next thing, what could there could be, something amazing over that next hill. And again, the lack of information was part of it because I just didn't know, I mean, you literally didn't know if the next city might be this amazing place that had everything you dreamed of. It might not, but it might. You just didn't know. There wasn't any way to tell other than to go there.”
“And so there was this... this urgency that I had to explore these, which were unknown to me, and encounter who knows what. Oftentimes it was boring. Oftentimes it was like not that interesting. But the next place might be, it was kind of like gambling in that sense of like, today I didn't really learn much, but tomorrow there's another place and that might even be better. And so that sense of eternally receding Shangri-La was part of how I got going from that first hit [of a trip to Taiwan]. It wasn't quite an addiction, but it was like getting really high on the first one and just saying, this is amazing. I'm going to do more. (20:12.528) I'm going to find another place.”
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“I went there and it was, I think, the bus from Northern India, the overnight bus to Kathmandu, was $5. You know, it's like, okay, $5. And again, I'm going to go to another planet. And then in the morning, you're in this fairyland of everything hand built, hand built. All the buildings are hand built, built with human power. It was amazing. And so, that thrill of being surprised, it is something that can be addictive.”
…..
“I woke the next morning [in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem] and I had a complete, utterly incredible... indescribable rebirth of experience. [It] actually, literally, felt like I was being reborn and I never, it didn't ever even cross my mind at the time before that that's what it was. But afterwards, I realized that that's that's what it was. And so I was given the gift of having an adult rebirth experience. It made me more interested in the future. It made me a little bit more interested in maybe not afraid of death. It made me, you know, it gave me many things.”
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