Not an ability that can be lost; rather something we forget to use.

‘Sophie’s World’ is a book that clearly differentiates humans from all other living things, by recognizing the fact that we can think, wonder, and are able to give reason. We have the gift in us to wonder, to question existing and possibly even provide answers to questions that need answering. However, as time passes, we forget the existence of this faculty of wondering and get used to the world as it is; we ‘crawl deeper into the rabbit’s fur’, and that’s when barely anything gives ‘rise to astonishment’.

Children and philosophers are two kinds of people that have much in common than we would think. They are the ones who ‘never quite get used to the world’; who want to show what ‘eternal beauty’ the world carries. One such philosopher, as we know of him, is Albert Knox. His statement, heavy in its words, forced me to think. There is clearly no doubt that as we grow older we are more accustomed to the world, that it gradually becomes a ‘habit’. Yet as much as I find myself agreeing with him, I still find that he is not fully correct in his assumption.

We grow older. With this, comes responsibility, pressures of society; things obviously not as important as knowing the origin of the world but significant concerns in our lives. So much goes through our daily lives that we forget that nothing would have been there if the world didn’t exist. Albert Knox literally accuses adults of ‘taking the world for granted’. Nonetheless, we are humans; and we are born with selfishness inside of us. We would rather take the shortcut in life and live in the world as we know of it than try and wonder where it came from. Our imagination is wide, and capable of giving answers to every question there is. It’s the central base of every human being. But with time, this diminishes; we no longer are surprised by anything, no longer feel the need to know where we come from. And this is what Albert Knox means.

Yet it’s not that we want this to happen on purpose. Adults are so engrossed with all other elements in their lives that are enormously vital to them, that they simply forget to use their imagination. Not only hectic lives are the cause of this, but the fact that as we grow older, we learn the scientific reasons behind everything- and this is how our zeal for wondering fades slowly with time. There was once when I believed stars to be souls of the deceased- until I learnt that they were just luminous balls of plasma that formed galaxies together.

Thousands of years have gone by, but we ‘never got to the bottom’ of life’s fundamental questions, never found an answer satisfactory enough- although there lives a solution somewhere. This reason itself is perhaps why we would prefer to ‘crawl deeper into the rabbit’s fur’ and stay there for years to come.

Knox’s statement is arguable, though on the whole, I would agree with him. With the increasing pressures in our daily lives, we simply forget the existence of this gift of wondering- just not lose it.