Everyone has a different view of life. To Albert Knox, he believes that as we get older, our sense of curiosity or wonder decreases as we get older. In other words, when we were young, we used to ask so many questions about certain things around us, like the environment, the animals and so on. However, as we grow older, we gradually lose our interest in asking these questions. A baby might see a box and start examining what it is he can do with the box. But when an adult looks at the same box, he would just feel indifferent towards this box and probably just leave it behind.
Looking back on things, I can’t help but say that I agree with Albert Knox. It’s quite true that nowadays, I rarely ask questions like “Who am I?”, or “When did life begin?”. It’s interesting considering that if I say “My name is Abigael Tan. I am the daughter of such and such”. I am answering the question “What am I?” not “Who am I?”. Whenever I look back to this question, I can’t help but think about a quote “What we are never changes. Who we are never stops changing.”. It’s very intriguing in the sense that it gets you to think about things that one would normally ignore.
I can think of a first few times when I asked myself, “Why does it rain?”, “What came first? The chicken? Or the egg? (Or in this book, the ‘ideal’ chicken). In those days, I think I was a lot younger, probably 8-10 years old, I’d probably keep thinking about these questions until my head hurts. But nowadays, I know how is rain comes to be, with the water vapor in the air condensing into tiny water droplets forming clouds, …etc. Yet, I no longer ask why do we need rain, or the question of what controls the strength of rain, or if the chicken or the egg came first and so on and so forth. These days, I would have just considered these irrelevant questions, and just put that question aside.
Of course, there are examples to prove this quote in the book. For example, when Sophie was asked the question “Have you ever wondered why we are alive?”, she started wondering almost immediately what the question could mean, and what the answer could be. On the other hand, when she asked the same question to her mother, her mother didn’t really put much thought into it and just felt exasperated. Her mother wasn’t curious at all. If she was, she didn’t show it. Her mother was already “deep down inside the rabbit’s fur”.
To sum up, what I have said previously, I do agree with Albert Knox that as we get older, we lose our sense of curiosity. We no longer ask questions about rain, chicken or the egg or life and death. Not the way we used to as a child. We would see these questions as irrelevant in our present lives and just shove them deep into our minds to never think about them again. Whereas, when we were younger, we would always be asking, and examining our anything and everything around us just because we want to know. When we were younger, we asked these sort of questions because we wanted to, not because we needed to.
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4 comments:
This is a good reflection.
Do you think the loss of curiosity is a good thing? What about questioning what you are told?
Does having a greater level of curiosity help someone to learn better?
To quote you:
"However, as we grow older, we gradually lose our interest in asking these questions."
and
"I rarely ask questions like “Who am I?”, or “When did life begin?”
Abigael: have you honestly lost interest in the "meaning of life"? Or who you are?
I'm not saying that I've completely lost interest in questions such as "Who am I?" and such. I just believe that we don't think about it as much as we use to when we were younger. Nowadays usually we tend to think about other things like schoolwork rather than the questions mentioned in the book.
Of course, there are still times when I want to know when life began, how it began, and do I have a purpose in being alive and what the meaning of life and so on. But it's just that when I do think of these things, other things come in the way like what work needs to be done. In the end, the question about who I am remains left without an answer. That still happens even today.
I believe it depends what one is curious at determinds whether it's good to lose one's curiosity or not. If it's a curiosity like why animals and behave the way they are, I can see no harm in losing that curiosity. So in this case, it sort of is a bad thing to lose our curiosity on, since nature has lots of surprises just waiting to be discovered if you look hard enough. However, if it's a curiosity like how fast fire can spread in a field full of grass and trees, I believe it's best to leave that curiosity alone before somebody gets hurt.
Questioning what one is told is something everyone has a right to. I mean, there has to be a reason why a person is telling you to do this and that. Of course, if you already know the answer to the reason, then it would be a waste to question what one is told. Otherwise, it's alright to ask why you are doing this and that if you don't know or understand why you are doing it.
I believe that having a greater level of curiosity does help someone learn better. That's because if one is curious about something, one would tend to look it up in their free time, whether on the internet, in books and so on. Also, if one is interested in something, one tends to remember information given to oneself easier. In that sense, if one is not interested in a certain topic, then one would probably remember half or even less that the potential amount one would have remembered if one was interested in the topic.
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