Introducing Curiosity Effect

On the bravery of living 'what if?'

I can’t shake the feeling, the older I get, that time is a trick. A fragile bouquet of blossoms, fragrant and fluttering with temporary surprise. A harmonium, keys moving to one melody, bellows pumping to another altogether. Sea glass hoarded in a pocket full of holes.

I’ve blinked and suddenly I’m somewhere in the middle of midlife. Thirteen years since A Field Guide To Now. Eleven since I moved to Portland. Ten since divorce tilted me into another orbit. Three since I started my strategy consultancy. Two since I began my coaching practice. Another blink, and I’ll be 48 in a matter of months. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been. More fulfilled. More tender. More alive. A woman my 18-year old self could never have imagined.

Between the last time I regularly shared my words with the world and now, I’ve become myself anew so many times. The only constant: A fierce pull to live the questions. To say yes without a roadmap. To fuck around and find out. To go all in for the adventure, without certainty, or assurance that I’m making the right move at all.

Curiosity has carried me through detours and heartache. A weekend affair. Big love. Big loss. Slow transformation. Plant medicine. Paying off my student loans. Raising teenagers. Dating in the age of algorithms. Therapy. Grief. Solo travel. Tantra. Friendship. Owning my own business. Cultivating a spiritual practice. And now to this.

Welcome to Curiosity Effect, a newsletter devoted to living the questions in real time.

In April, curiosity found me on a yoga mat in the Costa Rican rainforest, among 125 others, listening to Zach Bush describe a belief held in the Kabbalistic tradition: that the timing of your birth and death is already set. In this cosmology, there is no cheating death. No biohacking your way into a future that isn’t already meant for you. Just as no chance encounter, no accident, no wrong turn will take your life before it is your time.

He spoke of hospice patients who weren’t supposed to live—but did. Ten percent, he said, would inexplicably not die, though medical consensus insisted they would. He spoke, too, of cancer patients who endured round after round of treatment, returned with clear scans, then died of aneurysm, or heart attack, or some other rupture no one saw coming. Since then, I haven’t been able to let this idea of timing go.

What if life isn’t something we control, but something we move within?

When I was 18, I believed I’d eventually arrive. That I’d get to a certain place in life, and actually have the answers. Like, there I’d be—and everything would make sense. Sweet young thing that I was then. I also flew to Germany with $800 in travelers cheques and no real plan except to see about a boy who had promised to teach me to rock climb.

Now I know this much: there is no arrival. No certainty. No there, there.

Still, we live in a culture obsessed with answers. AI is everyone’s instant know-it-all sidekick. “Facts” reign over imagination. What’s “known” gets far more credence than what has yet to be fully understood. The Internet is profuse with absolutes: buy this one thing, follow this one way, and your life/skin/relationship/sex/career will be perfect. Curiosity not required.

But what if leading your best life isn’t about having the answers at all?

As a strategist and intuitive coach, I’ve seen again and again that the most meaningful growth—whether in a person or a company—rarely comes from knowing. It comes from asking. From moving toward what’s alive instead of what’s proven. Life isn’t meant to be solved. It’s meant to be lived in full-on curiosity—which is not, as many assume, just a personality trait.

Curiosity is a force.

It’s the most powerful technology we possess as humans to open ourselves to that which has yet to exist. It invites new ways of seeing, being, and engaging—with ourselves and with each other.

When you dare to ask—What if I leave my ‘secure’ job, walk away from the relationship I’ve outgrown, or take a big leap or a small step toward that dream that won’t stop whispering?—you find yourself living a more abundant life. Not easier, but richer. Not more certain, but more wonderful.

So why now?

Like many of us, I’m grappling with how to contribute meaningfully in a time when old paradigms no longer serve, and there is ever greater urgency for new ways of relating—to ourselves, each other, our living earth.

What I know is this: part of my work is in living the what if? And in doing so, offering you the invitation to do the same.

Heady with answers, we get tricked into playing small, going the expected route, opting for the safety of the familiar over the expanse of the unknown. But here, in the blink of now as time unfolds, what happens is up to us. We can live a life beyond our wildest—and more often, our incredibly limited—imaginations. What if? holds vast possibility.

What to expect:

Each month, I’ll follow a question—across relationships, spirituality, leadership, sex, money, or other subjects that brush against taboo—and invite you into the fertile (feral?) terrain of curiosity.

Join me?

xo
Christina