Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

Self-belief unlocks the reckless curiosity

There's something almost backwards about this idea at first: shouldn't curiosity and wonder come before self-belief? But Cummings is pointing at something real. When you doubt yourself, you're constantly bracing for failure, filtering experiences through the lens of "what if I'm wrong" or "what if I look foolish." That defensive crouch closes you off. Real curiosity—the kind that makes you ask strange questions, try something you might be bad at, or follow a random thought down a rabbit hole—requires a kind of recklessness that only feels safe when you trust yourself to survive being wrong.

The everyday version is familiar: you don't ask that question in the meeting, you don't sign up for the class, you don't have the conversation. Not because you lack intelligence, but because some part of you is protecting against the possibility of exposure. Once you actually believe you're worth taking seriously, that a bad moment won't destroy you, suddenly the world becomes infinitely more interesting. You become the kind of person who notices things, who wonders aloud, who tries things just to see what happens. That's not arrogance—it's the opposite. It's freedom.