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© Copyright 1999, Jim Loy
Many years ago, I was eating (chicken, as I recall) at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I was watching a little child (maybe a couple of years old), whose mother (it would seem) was waiting in line to order food. The child walked up to a curtain, pulled it back, and was delighted to find a blank wall, no windows. The child tried to call his/her mother's attention to this situation. And the mother said, "Get away from there."
To me, the child represented all of the people who are curious about the world, who delight in new discoveries. The mother represented the multitudes of other people, who are not curious, whose minds are no longer alive to that sort of thing. You and I know that curtains and windows go together, but not always. We would not be surprised to find a blank wall behind a curtain. But, we are curious and childlike, aren't we? We want to know things, things that other people know, and things that no one has ever known.
It was a delight to watch this child. I may have enjoyed the child's discovery more than the child did. I was saddened to think about the mother. Of course, she may have been a wonderful person, with a wonderful mind. She just may not have been in tune with her child, at that moment. But, I wondered if this child would be stifled, worn down, like so many, and become an adult without any childlike thoughts. That saddened me.
To my mind, the two golden, childlike properties of a brain are curiosity and creativity. Many adult activities (jobs, hobbies, pastimes) use one or the other of these properties, in particular the sciences (mainly curiosity) and the arts (mainly creativity).
Curiosity: Is there an easy way to count those holes in that square? Why did they put a four-way stop here? Do some bees prefer yellow flowers to other colored flower? What knocked this fence down? By the way, it was snow, which broke a branch, which knocked the fence down, and someone took away the branch and left the fence lying flat. If I had not driven by, in various stages of that process, it would have remained a mystery to me.