For most of my 20s, I couldn’t brush my teeth, ride public transit, or take a walk without listening to a podcast or audiobook. Silence, I thought, was a waste of time.

But since reading All the Beauty in the World (2023), I’ve been reconsidering my relationship to dull, seemingly empty moments. In the book, Patrick Bringley recounts his decade among the watchful guards of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Standing in the Met’s echoic halls for hours on end, day after predictable day, he found that, over time, his relationship to the work slowly changed. Initial enchantment with the art gave way to boredom – and then, enlightenment. He surrendered to the ‘turtleish movement of a watchman’s time’, stopped thinking about how much of his shift was left, and let the hours drift.

I think about Bringley’s experience when I have to engage in any long, monotonous task. It might be waiting in line or on hold, vacuuming, folding laundry, or chopping vegetables for dinner. I resist the urge to fill the time with music or podcasts and strive instead for what Bringley calls a ‘princely detachment’ from time, finding the luxury and nuance in the moment.

Bringley noticed patterns in the different kinds of Met visitors. Hanging up my laundry, I notice patterns in how different articles of clothing tend to wrinkle in the wash. Bringley developed an appreciation for artworks that he initially ignored. I pay finer attention to the unique composition of facial features on the faces of people I stand in line with. I am learning, I think, to appreciate the little things.

Of course, it requires constant practice to find the peace and richness in these stretches of time. But your reward comes, Bringley says, when an hour no longer feels an hour long, and you ‘hardly remember how to be bored’.

Often, forgetfulness is a mere inconvenience: that name, date or task that simply slipped through the cracks. But, sometimes, it’s downright unsettling to forget something. A friend asked me the other day: ‘Remember that hilarious dinner we had there a few years ago?’ And when for the life of me I couldn’t, I felt as if a slice of my existence had been cast into oblivion.

The ancient Greeks harbored a similar, if more pronounced, terror of forgetting. Plato associates forgetting with ‘non-being’, nothingness. Homer’s heroes do heroic things in order to achieve kleos (fame), and thereby defeat the destruction that comes with being forgotten. (As one of the Seven Wise Men said: ‘You will obtain memory through deed.’) Perhaps as a kind of buttress against the fear of forgetting, they anointed Mnemosyne, memory, the mother of the nine muses.

But I enjoyed learning the other day that this negative view of forgetting wasn’t shared by all ancient peoples. Daoism positively celebrates forgetting, indeed raises it to the status of an art. Zhuangzi, a founder of the tradition, urges people to master this art in order to gain a glimpse of Dao (the way), the eternal substratum of our passing world. As the philosopher Xia Chen writes, Zhuangzi’s idea is that the more of the world we’re able to forget – be it morality, history, the arts – the more we’re able to discover our true self, shaving off all that’s inessential to get down to the pith that we ultimately are.

Now, I don’t know if that will be of help when I inevitably confront the next lost memory, but it’s good to remember, if possible, that there’s a certain, subtle benefit in forgetting. ‘Only by forgetting,’ wrote the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘does the mind have the possibility of total renewal.’

Is there more than one kind of curiosity? I found myself reflecting on this after reading a recent study about different curiosity styles. An analysis of 483,000 Wikipedia users found that people pursue their curiosity in three ways. Some browse articles as ‘hunters’, targeting ‘specific answers in a projectile path’, and their interests are more likely to be in science and technology. Others are nomadic ‘busybodies’, who explore more, building broad, loose networks of knowledge; they gravitate toward arts, culture and the humanities.

A third group are the ‘dancers’ – a little harder to define, they tend to leap ‘in creative breaks with tradition across typically siloed areas of knowledge’, taking an unstructured and inventive approach to information-seeking, across radically different subjects.

This made me wonder what kind of curious I am. When I’m reporting as a science journalist, I tend to adopt the ‘hunter’ style. This helps me meet deadlines, but am I missing out on the serendipity of discovering knowledge like the busybody or the dancer? I’d like to believe I’m curious about the world, but realising that other people’s curiosity might be more nomadic or creative gives me pause.

Another downside to the hunter style is that it’s associated with what’s called ‘deprivation curiosity’. This is the desire to banish the discomforts of uncertainty and lack of knowledge. It can lead people to accept easy answers or false facts. It also correlates with overconfidence in one’s worldview, and lower wellbeing. I hope I’m not motivated by deprivation curiosity when I’m hunting knowledge, but I can’t guarantee that’s always true.

The psychologist William James described curiosity as ‘the impulse towards better cognition’. If I take his words and the Wikipedia study to heart, perhaps I ought to be more curious about my curiosity.