There is a childlike quality to wondering and it is this wonderment that keeps us young at heart and in tune with the world. This point was recently made clear to me as I snacked on milk and cookies with a brilliant five-year-old. She is brilliant, not only because she is my grandchild, but because she possesses wisdom that I apparently have misplaced in my brain, which is too full of grown-up stuff!
She asked, “Did you ever wonder why the sky is blue?” I certainly should have known that! But, the truth is that up until that moment, I had pretty much taken it for granted. As a matter of fact, I often become so wrapped up in seemingly important life details that I forget to even look up at the sky for days at a time. It was that realization that caught me off guard.
As I stood next to her, staring up at the blue vastness above me, I asked her what else she wondered about. Her answer? “I wonder about lots of things. I want my brain to grow big and if I don’t think about things, it will grow small.” It was at that point that I began to feel like a pea brain.
It is logic like hers that is responsible for the discovery of such life enhancing developments as electricity, penicillin, good music and chocolate éclairs. In all of those cases, someone had to wonder “What would happen if…?”
After that day, I started to wonder about more things. For instance, what happens to fat when you lose it? Does it just float around in the atmosphere and eventually attach to some innocent passerby? Why is it that only one out of every three hundred shopping carts has four wheels that go the same way at the same time? Why is laughter contagious? Why is it that at a certain age, people lose hair where they want it but grow hair where they don’t want it? But most of all, I wondered about why and when I stopped wondering.
There is a difference between being childISH and being childLIKE. There is nothing immature about stretching our minds; as a matter of fact, that is how we stretch our productive lives. If we don’t exercise our brains, they might get flabby and a flabby mind never did anyone any good!
The best part is that we can never be too old or too tired to participate in “brain aerobics.” Wondering keeps us in touch with our inner child and prevents our brains from growing small! So says my five-year-old and I have no reason not to believe her!
By the way, I now know why the sky is blue. I am still working on the “where the fat goes” question.
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