Ever felt like you don't enquire enough? Have you ever just taken a deep breath and letting it all out, perhaps whilst sitting on the balcony of your home, glazing into the bright blue sky and letting Miss Imagination loose (whose job is to turn the clouds into really cool images), not caring for the cool breeze that's all up in your face, and for once just admire the birds, trees, critters, sun, dirt rocks and finally admit to yourself that you know so darn little about them?
I was in a similar situation yesterday morning. Here at campus, there are a few mango trees planted by the wayside. They give us shade and fresh air on both busy and free days. I sat on one of the few cement and stone benches under the trees and quickly become bored. Time would've seemed to go by a lot faster if only I had my phone with me. It was dead so I didn't bring it to school with me. The worst past was that I had to sit there for a few hours. After a long while of just sitting there and playing with a mango that I Had picked up a while before, an agama lizard popped out of nowhere and rested at the base of the tree.
Source couldn't find a free picture of an agama 😅
The first time thought that latched on to my mind like a leech on fresh skin was to find something quickly and throw at it. Before I could raise my head up again, it had moved far away from me, taunting me with its signature head nod. It was then a rather strange question clicked in my head: "why is its head red?"
Like a herald that announces the return of an army from war, that one thought ushered in a whole lot more questions regarding manu things around me; why does the wind blow? how is the sun fixed in space? what are the rocks made of? how do birds fly? why do we have language? why do I cry when I'm sad? why is this mango even tasty? The remaining one and a half hour I sat there didn't seem as long as the preceding hours. I realized that there were so many unanswered questions out there, that there was so much around that mango tree that I just didn't know about, talk less of our planet or the universe.
It made me sad. I believe the cherry on top, the bane of the awful situation, the part I still haven't gotten over, and maybe may never get over is that I'm not searching for these answers.
You'd think that in an age where we're able to get the answers to so much of all the questions that we could ever think of in so little time, the majority of the human population would be much more enlightened on the natural world around it. So why then aren't we? Why do we just look at and around ourselves and feel like we don't need explanations to these questions? Are we too comfortable not knowing the 'whys' and 'hows'? Have we been so conditioned to the environment and the non-inquisitive culture around us that all the knowledge seems ultimately pointless? The answers that have been figured out and documented safely on the internet waste away. Of course, what's my business with the nature of the very dirt I step on when TikTok is there to be my 'business' all day long?
Maybe it is time to get back to being like a little kid. I asked a whole lot of questions back then when I didn't even have access to phones. Would I possibly be able to start searching for these answers? Truth be told, I don't know. I can't promise myself that because I know how difficult it is. But one thing I do know, and it's that it's only when I start questioning that I would have something to find an answer to.
So anytime you're looking for me, I'm probably under the mango tree.
all unsourced images were edited on Canva
