During the seemingly endless twelve hours of graduation festivities, a few things stood out to me amidst all the everything encountered. The knowledge of the various commencement speakers allowed me to stop and think about life in general and how much possibility remains around us. One thing that I was made aware of today was the significance of curiosity. A certain scholar talked about his journey and mentioned the role that curiosity played in how his life has since panned out. In short, without curiosity, he would not have had the life, people, and opportunities that he has today. Even through a (delirious) family dinner toast, I found that one of the reasons for my own brother to choose a college to go to was in a sense of pure curiosity for all the wonderful things that past and present students had said and experienced.

Throughout all of this I realized that everyone possesses a sense of curiosity. However, it is how we act upon it that really counts. I learned that responding to curiosity is crucial in our growth and development. Curiosity allows for discovery and exploration that would not be completed otherwise. Although familiarity is comforting, it is also a wall that restricts us from moving forward and learning new things. Curiosity is a strong self-motivator if we let it take us wherever it may. As I mentioned before, anyone can be curious, but it is what we do with our curiosity that will determine the outcome.

Pay attention to your curiosity. Any ounce of yearning or questioning should be fostered through research, discovery, and adventure. If we ignore the curiosity that we possess, we are not fully cultivating all the possibilities and opportunities that our lives have the capacity to contain. Just as the old saying goes, "You never know unless you try it." If we never try or challenge our thoughts and questions, we will never be able to explore the skills we possess, realize the complexities of arguments and opinions, obtain a wider knowledge, or expose ourselves to the lives that we could have had. Just as necessity is the mother of invention, curiosity is the gate to possibility. We can never be aware of how little or how significant our actions upon curiosity change our lives. It can be as simple as learning one new fact about something completely random, or it can be as prominent as fully changing the course of which our lives follow. Whatever the outcome may be, we will never know our possibilities unless we act upon our curiosity.