“Curiosity is the antidote to fear.”

Leadership Legacy · Chapter 3

I’ve been sitting with this all week.

Not as a thought. As a practice.

I’ve been working on a 1899 map. The North Polar Region. All longitude lines radiating outward from a blank centre that was depicted as empty, unknown.

It was not empty. The cartographers drew it blank because holding what they knew alongside what the system required them to say was impossible. That’s not ignorance. That’s fear doing what fear does. It forecloses. It makes you draw a blank where there is actually a centre.

The longitude lines on that map radiate outward and stop at the edge of the frame. I’ve been following them past the edge. Congo. Sudan. Venezuela. Gaza. Each one a place where the same logic that drew the blank centre is still operating. Each one a place where the cost of that blank is being paid right now, in bodies, in soil, in water.

I understand why organisations are retreating to the most familiar voice in the room right now. When everything feels unstable, certainty is seductive. Even borrowed certainty. I feel that pull myself sometimes.

But curiosity and fear can’t fully occupy the same space. And the questions this moment is asking don’t yield to certainty. They yield to the capacity to stay in the room with what’s actually there.

That’s not comfortable. I know that. I’ve sat in enough rooms to understand that when the mirror gets held up, the first instinct is to look away.

The question I keep returning to isn’t who has the answers. It’s who is willing to stay curious long enough to find them.

Is curiosity the antidote to fear — or is that itself a privilege?

That question wants a room. Watch this space.

Leadership Legacy is published by Wiley. Available wherever books are sold.