I got used to them...the stars at night. They were magical as a child, but as a young adult they had become so mundane to hardly deserve my attention.

Then I discovered Carl Sagan. Watching each episode of Cosmos was a profound experience. Suddenly the stars—and our place in them—never seemed so fascinating.

We are led to believe that this "magic to mundane meter" is a one-way street. Something new comes along, we are enamored by it, then over time we ignore its wonder. Here are examples where society has gotten bored by the stuff that was once brilliant:

• The wheel
• Writing
• Agriculture
• The compass
• The telephone
• The automobile
• Airplanes
• Television
• The Internet, computers, and smartphones

AI is next of course. Give it another day or so. We won't even remember it's around us. It will fade into the mundane just like the stars did for me.

So what did Carl Sagan do to turn the mundane back into the magical? It's simple: he was curious.

The "magic to mundane meter" isn't a one-way street

At any time, we can choose to stop for a moment and ask some version of, "Wait a second, wow, I'm thousands of feet up in the sky. How is it that this airplane is flying again?"

While Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," the power of simple curiosity goes even further. You can take anything, even something as mundane as a cardboard box, and just start wondering about it, and leave with a sense of the magical.

Curiosity is something you can activate at any time. It leads to a sense of wonder, awe, and even joy.

Curiosity is the cure to the mundane.