Let’s start from the top

I was smarter when I was younger, not to say that I am not smart now or that I was ever smart then but it just seems so.

I think my intelligence (over-smartness, in some people’s estimations) came from a unique sense of perspective; something, I’m sure, my poor parents probably had a tough time reconciling with over the years. One of my first memories from school was “geography” and “mountains,” which was also the source of a life altering epiphany for me.

Now kids those days weren’t expected to know all about mountains or valleys, but what they were expected to know was what the ideas were. I had the basic information down pat, smart kid that I was; spelling, however, was a completely different matter, particularly BIG words like “M-O-U-N-T-A-I-N.” Eight letters not sequenced in the manner that my young fragile mind had committed to only just a few years ago.

I would think that most kids would diligently sit at the table and recite the sequence until they had it right and could spell the word on their own; but not me. It occurred to me fairly early in the exercise that in a test that would ask me what a ‘mountain’ is, there was no way to get around it without actually spelling the word in the question! You ask me what a ‘mountain’ is; at least I know how it is spelt.

While this might seem simple and straightforward, it set in me a sense of work ethic that ensured that I not waste time on avoidable details. Interestingly my brain, now not compelled to remember rewarded me by quickly absorbing the information!

This in a way probably explains how a lot of great inventions, such as the discovery of penicillin or flight, happened accidentally. Sometimes you miss the forest for the trees and all that kind of gakooky. So incredibly by asking my brain not to remember, what my brain was doing was by remembering what I asked it to do it was actually remembering what I had asked not to! An epiphany? Let’s just call it a Talatism.

Simply said we pay too much attention on the details and not so much on the facts. Like the time I got a ‘C’ in history or geography when I was in the fifth grade, my father was irritable until I pointed out that we’d laugh at the test sheet in five years. Naturally he was not much amused at the time, but I am pretty sure that at the end of those five years my grade was duly forgotten let alone matter.

Like they say, “don’t sweat the small stuff.” It’s nice to also know that given the right perspective (and time) “everything is small stuff.”