The Things We Discover

As we progress from being a baby to being a kid to being an adult, there is a lot we discover about ourselves and about the surroundings we find ourselves in. This discovery phase is at its absolute peak when we are absolute babies. In this stage, the only thing we know for sure is that we can cry. Everything after that is a discovery.

We discover that crying can get us a lot of things like attention, food, mummy, clean diapers and such. In fact that's the stage where we also run the maximum risk of shutting our minds to the innumerable other discoveries waiting to be made because we get the world on a platter just by crying. Some babies do succumb to this risk and turn out to be big babies but thankfully, a majority of parents help in disabusing us of this notion.

We grow and start becoming kids. And with it, our innate sense of adventure and discovery kicks in again. It starts with realizing that those two, big, funnily shaped fleshy appendages below our tummy are useful for standing on. And surprise, surprise! we can also move about by working those appendages. This realization actually comes in a pack of two, sometimes with an added bonus. The second one being that the floor is hard and it hurts an awful lot and the bonus addition is the realization that those hard, pearly white thingies in our mouth are not un-breakable.

Once these basic, important discoveries are out of the way, we are once again lulled into a sense of complacency and bliss until the next discovery. This is one which forces itself on us. School! In my opinion, that discovery is better left alone to be discovered when we are sufficiently prepared for it. Like when we are 18 and legally adults. But for some reason, it is thrust under our noses a decade and half earlier. School does allow us to make some pleasant discoveries like friends, sleeping hours and favorite teachers but these are almost completely overshadowed by not-so-pleasant ones like studies, exams and competition which take up a major part of the discovery bandwidth available during our years in school. Slowly but surely we see the scales tilting irrevocably in favor of growing up and that too, just to 'keep up with the Joneses'. If your brain had been wired a little wrong, then you would probably have wanted to 'outdo the Joneses' in which case the scales would've tilted a lot faster.

Whether it is fast or slow or medium pace, there is one, and absolutely only one, advantage to growing up. Having had no say in the growing up process so far, we suddenly discover that now, after having grown up, we have a choice; an option to decide whether we want to grow further or not. I wonder why we don't discover this option first. If not for anything else, it might at least save us the trouble of facing all those teething problems we invariably seem to face when we first start growing. But like someone said sometime, 'Better late than never'.

This most important of discoveries is what I made a little while back. I took my pick, and as expected, I chose not to grow up. It's a pain.