Jargogled Impressions.

Hi there little one – 

It’s been awhile since I last wrote for you here. Reasons are many, and yet they are mostly excuses. Suffice to say, you have kept us busy and this busyness has been a welcome antidote to the frenetic, sometimes muddled pace of life. 

You are almost 15months now – just thinking about it makes me want to wind back time just so I could relive it all over again. You can walk now with confident abandon and chuckle like you do – with a characteristic nonchalance. There are words now that come fully formed to you, and sounds that seem to be responses to what you see around you, what you want, and what you are curious about. Half formed sentences they seem to me, even as the delightful joy that comes bundled with the energy when you deliver it seem to capture the intensity of the present. 

Are you conscious now? Do you sense the presence of a self in this large, wondrous world? I want to believe that you do, leaving aside the debates of what consciousness actually means and just focusing on its colloquial meaning. There is a determination I see in your outbursts, a deliberate attempt at shaping your environment, a willful tinkering with the toys at hand, and a firm grasp of what should or should not be fed to you. All normal things for a toddler to start coming to terms with for sure, but watching the arc of this growth is a delightful experience, and an educational one too. It’s said that parents relive their childhood through the vicarious experiences of their offsprings. I can add that parents come to terms with who they are, where they come from, and what they want too, through their progeny. 

You are curious about other people you meet outside your home. Waving generously at strangers in the coffee shop, on the urban walks, inside your classroom – I sense a proclivity to interact and engage with your fellow human beings. There is a curiosity, with a childlike impatience, that shines through the detritus of this muddled life adults lead around you. I am hoping we can preserve this curiosity till such point that you can take your own decisions, and even then, that you choose to keep it, despite the effort and the passion it sometimes demand of us. Your mum calls you “the curiosity rover”, a term that I am hoping stays with you as you explore more of this world you have arrived into and make it your own. In the meantime, my hope is that this little world – your family – will be the command center of your expeditions. You’re mum and I would be the shuttle crew that helps you steer through the vast archives of human feat and imagination and outward into the vast unknown. 

You are also beginning to conjure games for yourself, using whatever (or whoever) it is that is around you to craft the games that delight you so much. It’s sometimes peek-a-boo, sometimes passing things around, or maybe it’s running and clapping in sync with other people. I realized I had forgotten what games were before you arrived. To us adults, games sometimes become a competitive arena or a stage for excellence in physical or mental acumen. We end up taking games too seriously. When I do that now though, I consider what you have taught me and begin to approach it differently. Unlike you though, it does not come naturally and I have to work at it. I hope that you never let go of this careless naïveté with the world around you even as you learn to care about others and about what you really want. 

You seem to have developed a catalog of emotions that are on display often during the day. I can see a personality developing with your own distinct affinities. It makes me wonder about my own years of growing up and how much of a blur life seemed to me back then, even as my lack of knowledge about the world lent itself well to me being grounded and more present. I bet you have your own mental model of the world you are constantly refining with new inputs. I wonder if these inputs are purely sensory or there are metaphysical aspects too – given that you are learning to communicate through acquiring the analog modalities of language and abstraction. You know, for a brief period, I was captivated by languages and its evolution and the role it played in getting us, humans, here. Language, I guess, is not merely a tool for ease of communication. It also is a vital catalyst for developing what we call consciousness – that distinctly human feeling of recognizing our finite self, our sense of self-centeredness amidst a relentless, indifferent world. To see you slowly building your repertoire of words that you can form is to see what evolution has given us through millennium’s worth of effort, and that we can only see through the fine tuned phases of biological and social growth. 

And now it’s time for you to wake up and restart your curiosity of this world you find yourself in. I am hoping we can be the tools you can use to venture out and absorb as much of this beautiful world. 

Love, 

Dad