Thought Picnic: Everything The Sun Lights Up

A Bus to the Village

I am reliably informed that I was a rather precocious child with strong opinions. One story my father tells often concerns the time we returned to Nigeria; well, my parents returned, as it was my first trip out of the UK. I was just around five years old. On the bus journey to our village, everyone seemed to be talking at the same time.

To my innocent self, the cacophony was so disturbing that I asked out loud how anyone could hear anyone else speak if they were all talking at once. A military man took umbrage at my outspokenness. I suppose I did not realise I was in a society where children were barely seen, talk less of being heard.

This soldier wanted to administer corporal punishment for my infraction, but all the other passengers prevailed upon him to quell his emotions. I do not recall any of this, not even in the deepest recesses of my memory; the whole episode comes to me in my father's telling.

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Curiosity Gone Underground

Beyond precocity, there was curiosity and inquisitiveness, a need to understand how and why. These were questions people struggled to answer, yet they were also good for conversation when you are trying to sustain a discussion with a child taxing your mental faculties. Those features remain characteristically personal; only now, it is easier to log on somewhere and find the information you want.

On the interpersonal front, however, I am considerably more reticent. I do not speak my mind as readily as I did when I was a child. I rarely pry, and I try not to invite myself into situations that have not elicited my opinion. As a consequence, I probably know so little about many people whom, by some sort of relationship, I am supposed to know a great deal more about.

The curiosity itself has not diminished; it has simply gone underground. I research discreetly, gather information surreptitiously, and obtain data covertly rather than directly. I find ways of coming by the facts without confrontation, and so my curiosity is satisfied by other means.

Questions Better Left Unasked

I wait for the information to be volunteered, even when the questions linger in my mind seeking answers or certainty. Yet I should be wary of asking the questions to which I already have the answers, especially the ones where shocking confirmations give substance to what would have been best left ethereal.

Then there are bits of casual information that hit you in ways so unexpected that you can feel your head warming up at the new realisation, quite impossible to fathom. These tend to be the things people assume you already know, which simply never came up in conversation at any other time.

That is when you begin to understand that the human story is never fully told. Any human story has always been part of the broader narrative of life, even if you have never come across it before; what seems weird and unusual to me can be entirely typical elsewhere, and in the process, my perspective is broadened. Whilst there is nothing new under the sun, you have not seen everything the sun lights up. C'est la vie.

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