Rediscover childlike curiosity and accept now

Whenever constriction and adversity set in, and negative emotion is about to emerge from the subconscious, I try to neutralize them with my one-year-old niece’s puffy little face.  It has a one-year-old’s intense curiosity.  When she came from the city to visit her grandparents in the countryside, everything and everyone seems to fascinate her and piques her attention; she stops in the middle of the streets, with head tilting up and down, and turning around, eyes scanning. Everything seems to fascinate her. She could fixate herself in one spot for hours if grownups do not nudge her to move ahead.

Indeed, every child more or less displays this curiosity and fascination.  Somehow, this curiosity and fascination wear and wane as we grow, perhaps because of the hardship life throws at us, or simply because of familiarity and habituation.  After all,  evolution reserves our core brainpower for the most pressing and challenging issues life throws us.  Perhaps there is some biological basis for most Chinese employers to blatantly discriminate purely based on age when hiring. Once over 40 or 45 for some more prestigious positions, one is deemed as deadwood that ought to be thrown away into a trashcan).  “You cannot treat an old dog new tricks,” as old sayings declare.

However, life is inherently complex and unpredictable, its powers are far beyond anything we can ever completely comprehend or control. This is reflected in nature and human society by remarkable diversity in both realms. To reignite childlike curiosity requires full acceptance of whatever uncertainty and unexpected life throws at us, and see them as valuable qualities of life.

No one can point this out more clearly than the existential philosopher, Schopenhauer, 

“This is why the same external events or circumstances affect no two people alike; even with perfectly similar surroundings every one lives in a world of his own…. The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning. On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man’s experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the signficance they possess when he describes them.”

I will recite these sentences to remind myself not to compare myself with others, or to envy other’s seemly perfect life.