When is man adult enough to be called a grown up? Is it the ability of the intellect to lord over instinct? To prune every action to reason, bring it to the plane of tutored understanding.
For the last few months my daughter, now 18 months, has driven a deep sense of despair, an anxiety to unlearn whatever my adult mind has come to think of as rational, and to pick up things anew, look up the sub-consciousness and delve into that instinct that manifested itself so freely and beautifully to communicate without words, without prejudice.
At eighteen (I am counting in months) she has, like most children her age, started to convey her needs with pronounced clarity in a medium that we have come to understand as language.
What discriminates a conscious mind from congenital innocence is the ability to say no. And, she has started to gather her wits and decline what she believes is unpalatable for her senses. It could be rejecting food for the lack of appetite, dismissing the strands of hair that accidentally stray into her mouth, or simply discarding the tunic chosen by her mother to dress her up on a day. It could be anything that she finds unattractive and she has armed herself with a coherent 'no' ready to dismiss it.
To be able to ask for more defines your love for something that cannot be appreciated even with a prudent yes. I realised its powerful connotation when my daughter started expressing her likes by simply asking for more. It could be "Aarro" in Bengali asking for more of food she has taken a fancy for. It could be "Abarr" goading her pishi or any adult for a repeat performance (of a song, dance, even buffoonery). Sometimes she would just appreciate a person's company by asking him or her to "come" over.
The simple instinct is at work when she is able to judge direction, calculate depth and understand the passage of time (not by reading clocks, which makes up for an evolved intellect). I am talking about dimensions.
She started getting down the bed by pushing herself over backwards with an effortless knack. But even before doing that she would dangle over the edge of the bed trying to measure the distance between her feet and the floor while entertaining a fear within. She can differentiate mornings from evenings to tell of the 'time' that has lapsed.
Some of her expressions are work of pure instinct. When confronted with a situation where she is unable to fathom what her companion is asking of her she puts up with a self-practised expression wherein she uses her eyebrows and plays them up and down repeatedly with a coy smile, which is a profound gesture for "you tell me."
Sometimes she would just blurt out "array" in response to things which she didn’t anticipate coming. Now she has this battery-operated mouse that is equipped with a motion sensor. When she runs after it and it changes course on its own without warning at the sight of an obstruction, she instinctively calls out "array…array".
I gathered we never taught her into the finer nuances of understanding. In fact, I now realise, we never had the aptitude to turn our attention to the simple things that define a moment far better than the powerful tool of a language. The realisation underlined the difference between a conscious mind and an evolved intellect. Maybe it is the same thing that sets apart nature from everything man-made.
While man, always eager to claim ownership over his creation, tags them, nature, which has never ventured to profit from its creations, offers on impulse. It could be the reason why intellect thrives in adults, while instinct flickers in every child's fancy to express in an unadulterated, untutored manner, the rebirth of the natural that is unyielding to the man-made.
