Life lessons

There is a best-selling book out there titled "All I need to know I learned in kindergarten". I have not read it but I am sure it offers something of value for all the readers who made it a bestseller. But just going by title alone, I find it hard to believe that a lifetime of learning can be crammed into the first 5 years of life. Perhaps I am a slow student but I know one thing, I am still learning. Everyday. From likely and unlikely sources. Not just teachers, leaders or elders but from every new interaction, every experience, every person I meet.

Teaching does not always happen only in a classroom. Learning does not happen only from professors. For a parent, a child is perhaps the best teacher. My daughter has certainly been the one for me. I have been smart enough to acknowledge the insights she has shown me in situations I have been through many times before, blundering through my days alike a bull in a china shop.

Here is what I learnt from her when she was 3 years old:
One busy morning as I was rushing through a list of errands, she spotted a snail moving across our path. She wanted to stop and watch it reach its destination - the lush grass on the other side. I left her to watch the show and moved on towards the stairs leading to our apartment. She bent down, deeply engrossed in observing the brown shell slide across the cobbled path. Careful not to impede its movement, she stayed far enough to watch but close enough to appreciate a miraculous moment in nature.

In that moment, she learnt about snails. And I learnt to stop and watch at least one of the many beautiful moments that each day brings into our hectic life. With many more of these moments that we have shared in the last 14 years, I now know that I have a teacher in my life who constantly amazes me.