There is something… magical about making discoveries. It’s one of those very fundamental, profound pleasures that stay with us throughout our life. We never really get tired of discovering things.
One of the most powerful and overwhelming feelings I’ve had as a child was the feeling of finding something unique around my house. Usually these were small things–things other people threw out of their window that landed on the playground I’d spend a lot of time in. They were small gears that were once part of some machine, or tiny tiles used in kitchen walls. There were toy cars that some reckless child threw out of a balcony. Of course, from a rational, adult perspective I shouldn’t have been collecting these things–God knows who handled them before and how they handled them–but we’re talking about a matter of passion here. And since I knew my mom would yell at me for being unhygienic or something (being a pessimist she would come up with all those diseases I could contract by playing with my treasures), they were my little secrets. Something I found and something only I am aware of.
I felt that way because of the sense of ownership I had for the little item I just found. I think this is the most incredible thing about discoveries–the discoverer is almost always the owner of the discovered (even if it’s a more abstract kind of ownership, for example, in form of gaining immortality as the discoverer or something precious). For example, the first dream I ever remember was one in which I found a camera — a nice one at that, an SLR (I didn’t even know what an SLR was, it just looked professional) — and I hid it on the side of my tiny little bed. When I woke up, I looked but couldn’t find the camera. The fact that it made me sad for a minute there meant that I had no intrinsic conception of the difference between a dream and reality, whereas I certainly was aware of the significance of discovery.
As we get older we don’t get any less overwhelmed. The pride of discovery is still there, but the discovery becomes more conceptual. Think about all the times you discovered a great book in a bookstore and felt really good about it. Or all the times you discovered how to put all the Lego bricks together without the user guide. I’d claim that the moment when you solve a problem is a kind of discovery (the aha moment; the kind of epiphany that Gregory House has every week).
Even today I get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I discover a fact that surprises me. Today the feeling is accompanied with a sense of relief: the world is not so small after all; there’s still things to learn, things that lie there hidden just waiting for us to uncover them. And while it’s not too likely we’ll tuck them away in a gap between our bed and the wall, we still feel like we own our discovery.
elevenseconds.com
blog.elevenseconds is powered by