Areesha Iqbal

LIFE’S A MYSTERY BUT DO WE CARE?

All humans are born different, mentally if not seemingly. But there’s one quality that is common to all of them and that is the attribute of curiosity. Humans when born are curious and interrogative to literally everything around them. They are surprised too; of course, a whole new world has to be surprising. This is one of the reasons why babies have to ask all of the questions in the world, why they are so startled even with a light turning on and off or a cat doing meow. They are curious and they want to know everything about this new amazing place they have stepped into. Whatever they see, which is literally everything around them, is a question to them, questions like why, how, where, when, and what. They want answers which is why they reach out to everything around them even the electricity boards on walls or hot coffee in their mother’s mug. Babies reach out to us too but because we, unlike them, do not find any of the things baffling enough to find answers to them, we just pass on to them the old information we had had from our parents or people around us. Not the answers about the life we searched for but the answers some philosophers in the past quoted and the same passed on to our parents from our grandparents and then eventually to us.

The world and life on it are a mystery. Babies know that when they are born. As babies, we knew that too but then we grow up and we forget. We get so busy with our lives that finding time to solve or think about this mystery is close to impossible for us. Some people do think about the questions of existence or how unordinary human creature is or the explanations beyond science. Poets like Rumi seeking eternal love, scientists like Stephen hawking wondering if the universe is expanding, philosophers like Socrates exploring questions of ethics, all didn’t let their tendency of questioning, their quality of ambiguousness die. The reason why they and others like them are greater in their approach than the rest of us is that they remained as curious, astonished, and surprised as a baby watching the tides of the ocean for the first time. As adults, we all have become contented with the information we have with ourselves now. So contended and convinced that we don’t bother to find out if there’s anything extraordinary out there until the scientists, philosophers or someone else finds it out for us. We teach the same to our kids too. At this point, the growth of human intellect stops. The same intellect that can do wonders if given a little attention and time. No wonder why we have billions of doctors, engineers, and teachers around us but very few thinkers. Seven billion schools of thought on the Earth, including yours, but hardly any of them are presented.