Both Sides Now

Most things I couldn’t understand as a kid now feel so obvious that they seem almost too trivial to spend time thinking about. Some of them are these:

1. Why do adults (disgustingly) lick their fingers when counting money or flipping pages in a book?

The short answer: their hands are dry. In fact, when I asked adults why they did that, another adult had already explained: because your hands get dry as you get older. But as a child, I had absolutely no way to imagine what “dry hands” meant. So when I asked, “What does it mean that hands get dry?” the usual reply was, “It just means your hands get dry,” which was not helpful at all. Let me give children a sense of what it actually feels like: imagine dipping your hands into a container of flour and covering them completely, then trying to flip a page. It won’t be easy. That’s what “dry hands” feel like. Now, if you add just a bit of moisture to your fingertips? The page will turn as if by magic.

2. What is the car at the very front doing that makes traffic come to a halt?

This question always frustrated me as a kid whenever we got stuck in traffic. I even asked adults directly, but nobody seemed to understand what I meant. If a child today were to ask me that, here’s what I’d say: the car in front is stuck at a red light. For example, on a highway, the exit ramp often narrows down to a single lane, which naturally creates a bottleneck. That ramp usually leads into city streets, and city streets have traffic lights. When the light turns red, the cars stop, and all the cars behind them line up, causing the jam.

3. Why do adults walk instead of running?

Adults were always telling me not to run and just to walk, but I could only ask in return: Why walk when you could run? Don’t they find it boring? Now I’ve become one of those adults who gets annoyed at children running indoors, but I’ve also forgotten why I wanted to run so badly when I was a child. Still, I have one hypothesis: children are lighter, so running doesn’t feel like much effort, but adults are heavier, and running feels like a strain. Supporting and moving your body doesn’t scale linearly with weight, it feels more exponential. Unfortunately, this explanation won’t satisfy children, but if adults understood this, maybe they could be a little more forgiving of kids who run around and not get so pissed off.

4. Why do adults insist on eating vegetables or kimchi that taste weird and unpleasant?

As a child, I thought adults had become health freaks, forcing themselves to endure vegetables they didn’t actually like just for the sake of health. But as I grew up, I realized that wasn’t true. Strangely enough, vegetables begin to taste good as you get older. The broth-like flavor, the aroma, the textures. I’ve heard that children’s senses are more sensitive, so those same aromas or textures often feel unpleasant to them. But eventually, you’ll come to like them. At some point, you’ll even find that a salad tastes better than candy or chocolate. Of course, as with everything else, there’s individual variation.

5. Why does that car have a California plate even though it’s in Atlanta?

Speaking from personal experience: the driver probably had to travel with a dog, and driving was their only option.

6. How do the tiny people get inside the television?

This one belongs to the children of an earlier era. When I was young, TVs had actual dials you turned and were bulky boxes, so I thought there were little people living inside the box, and what we were watching was their world. I imagined doll-sized actors, mass-produced like Barbie dolls, that were put inside every TV including ours and the neighbors’ to perform shows. Adults only ever told me, “There are no people inside,” but without explaining that luminance and color signals were being modulated, broadcast over the air, and then demodulated by circuitry inside the TV to produce the picture. If there aren’t little people in there, then you should at least tell me how the people do appear on screen!

Things that seem incomprehensible or unreasonable to children usually become naturally understandable once you grow up, without anyone ever explaining them. But still, it wouldn’t hurt if adults could muster a bit more patience to explain them to these very new little humans.