A few days ago I took my two boys on an early morning walk. It’s the boys in our home that are the early risers, waking up about 5:30am and usually asking to watch a show or snuggle in bed. Both options are mostly not allowed, except for weekends. And so to curtail the early morning shenanigans and give the girls their beauty sleep, Charlie, August & I often go on walking adventures around our neighbourhood. 

We’ve discovered that it’s best that August leads the way. If either Charlie or I head in a certain direction, he’ll be sure to protest, dig in his heels and insist on going the opposite way. His stubborn, independent, but adventurous nature, can only be channeled when he feels he has a choice in the matter. Hence, he leads. Sometimes we give him a choice of which way to go… and if he doesn’t want to answer, we just go our way and sure enough, we’ll be given the command to go the other way. Charlie and I usually excitedly follow his new command and off we go. 

On this particular morning we stayed on the street doing loops around our little cove of a neighbourhood. It had rained overnight and the road was damp — the charcoal bitumen had turned a wet black. We came across a cane toad that had its innards coming out of it’s mouth, still twitching after being run over by an early morning commuter. Cane Toads in Queensland, Australia, are the equivalent to a New York City subway rat or Trafalgar Square pigeon in London. A pest that most people are grossed out by, especially when they occupy every square foot of your front lawn at night and you have to play “dogem” just to take the late night garbage out to the rubbish bin. The experiments my friends and I would conduct on cane toads as a child, I am to ashamed to tell here. Let’s just say, this morning there were no BB-guns or golf clubs, but instead we chose to give the little fella a dignified ending in the bush and I apologised for all my past misdeeds to these resilient creatures.

We trudged along, with August leading from behind, usually distracted by something whilst barking orders about the direction we should be heading. Charlie, on the other hand is quite the inquisitive lad. He’s already told me that he’d love to be a scientist or play Cricket for Australia when he grows up. he has already decided that his high school elective subjects are biology, chemistry, physics and PE… he’s still in third grade.

Our goal on the walk is to be as observant as possible, pay attention to the small details that we come across, use our curious minds to look closely at things, ask questions, and be in wonder of whatever it is we come across — the changing colors of leaves, the fungi growing on the tree, a dead cane toad on the road. 

Today, Charlie asked, “why is the road dry and grey at that spot over there (pointing near the drainage grate), but the rest of the road is wet and black?” He’s now at that age where I can’t just make an answer up to satisfy his curiosity and since I didn’t have an immediate response, we investigated.  

The drainage grate was a good five metres from where we were standing but we both noticed something right away. The gutter is designed so that waters flows towards the drain, however, we could see that above the grate — the grey, dry area — there was a slight rise in the road. We got on our knees like a golfer reading the slopes of the green before making a putt. Sure enough, the grey area of road was raised like a slight mound. Could this be the reason it was dry while the rest of the road was wet and black? Just then we looked for other areas of dry road, and just as we suspected, at the crest of the bitumen, down the middle of the road, dry lines and spots were visible. Like Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, we felt rather accomplished with our investigative success. We even noticed that the top of the concrete gutter was dry and a stone white colour compared to the bottom, where the water trickled, changing the concrete to a darker charcoal shade. 

Now, none of this is really all that groundbreaking, but the real magic is that I didn’t just tell Charlie (and August, who was busy distracted by the neighbours’ mail boxes), the answer or make something up. We asked questions, payed attention to detail, and experienced the joy of self-discovery. 

So often in my life, I thought I just needed to ask someone smarter than me the answers to all the questions I had. I would be smart and intelligent and full of knowledge. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that some people just passed on ill-informed answers that they were handed down, or simply answers made-up, like a parent trying to pacify the wonderful, but incessant curiosity of a child. 

True wisdom and joy in life is found through the art and science of self-discovery, not merely inherited information.