Little Things

Yesterday, I was dicing lady's finger...(ladies finger? lady's fingers? ladies fingers?... How is it spelt?....I digress! Back to the story!) ...for dinner. That's when I had a blast from the past. I was transported to my nursery art classes. I think my first ever tryst with this vegetable (raw, I mean) was in the art class. My teacher handed out a chopped stub of this vegetable, prompted us to dip it into water colour and make imprints on paper. Then you follow it up with fanciful brushes of green (for the stem and leaves), and what you got were flowers! I was so thrilled back then. A cross-section of a vegetable put to great creative use.

And as my mind ploughed through the goldmine of childhood memories, I was reminded of yet another art class resource... pencil shavings! It reminded me of how carefully I would sharpen colour pencils to get neat shavings, which I would then carefully paste on paper to form flowers. And when it became a beautiful bunch of flowers on paper, I had felt proud! I made it!

And then I thought...

Where is that innocence? When all you needed were pencil shavings-turned-into-flowers to make you happy?

Where is that curiosity? To see things beyond what they appear, and turn it into a work of art?

Where is that sense of accomplishment? When all you had to do was dip a vegetable into colour and make a masterpiece?

I think that's called growing up.

It's ironic. When you are small, you wonder when you will grow up. My cousins and I, we used to play games where we pretend to be running a house and cooking; with toy dining set, dolls, mud, gravel, leaves... anything! (yes, we used anything we got in our hands!). We used to team up as little families and do the 'neighbourhood' game. Nothing exotic about it; we'd just pretend to be small families living in a neighbourhood and live through a make-believe world. We girls would try to make sarees out of any scrap of cloth longer than 1 metre, pretend we are adults and charade in the ancestral home (when we met up for vacations). Good times those!

And now that I am a grown up, I wish to be a child. Things were way uncomplicated back then. Are they now? Or they seem to be? I don't know.

When life grows on you, it's hard at times, to be delighted by the little things of life. I am not saying that the next time you look at a Bhindi (this solves the problem of me getting *lady's finger* wrong!) and say, "Wow! This vegetable looks like a finger!" But well, you get the drift.

 

I am talking of the ability to be amazed by the little things in life. I am trying to rediscover mine.

 

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Thought for the day: "Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why?"