Curiouser and curiouser ...

As long as I can remember, I have had the habit of analysing things … 
I guess it’s a natural curiosity in me that needs to be satisfied. I remember in primary school, being asked to memorise the order of the planets in our solar system … mercury, venus, earth, mars, jupiter, etc … when I asked the teacher ‘why that order?’ … she couldn’t answer the question. I struggled to memorise them because some part of me needed to understand ‘WHY THAT ORDER’ before I could give myself permission to do it … later on, I came to understand that the order (obvious now) was determined by proximity to the sun … but the teacher had neglected to explain this to me (or didn't actually know herself) and so my ‘problem’. I was always asking ‘why?’ and if not ‘why?’, then ‘how?’. Why can that person do something but that other person cannot? Curious. Why is the alphabet constructed in the order it is? Why not another order? Curious. And so on …
Our natural curiosity is perhaps our most powerful ‘learning tool’; children are over-flowing with this quality - it is oozing our of their very pores. Often adults are just ‘too busy’ with the running of their lives to get back in touch with this childhood habit … sad! Very sad! We should remain ‘curious’ - we should nurture our ‘curiosity’ - it goes to the very heart of what it is to be a human being (in my opinion). JBW

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