Welcome to Kelly Corrigan Wonders. I'm Kelly Corrigan, and today I'm wondering about

curiosity. This is the sixth and final episode in our series called Super Traits, made

possible by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Today's guest is Pico Ayer, a writer whose many books include The Art of Stillness,

The Open Road, and A Flame, Learning from Silence.

For more than 50 years, Pico has been traveling with and writing about the Dalai Lama. He's never owned a cell phone.

He goes on silent retreat regularly, and he recently made his acting debut in the film Marty Supreme,

playing the head of the International Table Tennis Association. A cold and impossible man,

which I have to say is casting against type because Pico could not be more lovely and thoughtful and open.

I had no idea that Pico was going to be in the film back when I interviewed him and was stunned to see him on screen.

Together, Pico and I will explore why curiosity requires surrender, why busyness and wisdom tend to be incompatible, and why wonder opens us up while belief closes us down.

Here's my conversation with Pico Iyer, recorded at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

You have this great line that more and more of us feel like emergency room physicians permanently

on call, required to heal ourselves, but unable to find the prescription for all the

clutter on our desks.

And that brings to mind this big topic that I want to draw your attention to, which is

the problem of time as an inhibitor to curiosity. So I often feel like I have some set of expectations,

and they waxen away over the course of a day,

depending on how productive I feel I've been, on how long a given thing should take a project

or an errand or even a conversation.

And then as it starts to hit the outer limit of my sort of random intuition about how long this should take

so that I can move to the next thing,

...