Staring out of the bus window at the bright, orange setting sun, I marvelled at how the clouds drew in the light and glowed, orange against grey; at how the sky appears to have a horizon of its own, splitting blue emptiness from the orange brightness; at how the moon stood still, staring down at the world, isolated in its own semi-circle arena. Times like these makes you appreciate nature and the beauty it brings to the world. Sadly, few seem to even look at such scenery anymore; most are intent on their private conversations, books, or nodding off to their mp3s.

Many a time, I would walk the long, lonely path along the main gate of NJC, absentmindedly wondering how the leaves pulsed with colour in the way they did, how the sunlight came through and lit the area around. The wind blew; the trees shook gently, and leaves floated down, as though acting as the mark of the wind’s passing. The light shifted, never resting in a single spot, and soft shadows overlapped other shadows to produce a remarkable spectrum of colours on the ground. Sadly, the long road remained empty of human presence except mine; it seems that few wish to take the longer path, as though rushing home to study for a few extra hours makes the difference between life and death.

So, what exactly is the significance of these occurrences? That they are yet more prove about how easily humans tend to take things for granted? Perhaps they are. Yet, we must further question: why are they taking such things for granted?

Our human lives can be viewed as being excruciatingly short, or being excruciatingly long, depending on how torturous you find life to be. (Let’s hope it is not the latter.) In a short span of 18 years, how can we have forgotten about why certain things have baffled people for centuries? Ancient humans believed in a god residing in the moon, gods of fire, and gods of the trees; there seems to be gods for everything. While easily dismissed as primitive beliefs of ignorant humans, have we been too quick to dismiss the mysterious nature of such “gods” around us, the mysteriousness that led to the creation of gods in the first place? Just because we can now explain certain phenomena that humans previously could not, have we forgotten why such phenomena were mysterious in the first place?

Eighty years ago, cavity radiations presented baffling problems for physicists. Cavity radiations were the “in” thing to experiment on, and scientists like Einstein, Planck and De Broglie spent countless hours pondering how to explain this phenomenon in a satisfactory manner. When the Photoelectric Effect was finally solved, cavity radiations took its place in the history of science, soon to be forgotten as a mysterious phenomenon worth thinking about. Today, the “in” thing is quantum mechanics, and giant underground particle accelerators. Fifty years down the road, will particle accelerators end up thrown on the road side, abandoned and unattended, like how we tossed our pagan gods away, how we forgot about beautiful sunsets, or how cavity radiations became mere history?

The shape change that the moon undergoes throughout the entire month is yet another phenomenon that humans used to find a supernatural, mysterious process. We now know that the moon is round, that the moon is just another piece of rock, and that the shape changes because light from the sun is reflected from its surface to reach our eyes. Unfortunately, we take for granted that the phenomenon is as dictated by scientific explanations, and that the moon cannot be a real god of its own. We dismiss it to be something not worthy of notice. In Isaac Asimov’s book, I read that the moon is an object unique to Earth; a planet’s satellite of its size is not found anywhere else in the universe. Whether that is true or not, it reinforces the idea that just because we think we understand how things work, we have forgotten why they were an object of interest in the first place; as such, we have failed to appreciate what significance even the most common objects hold.

With understanding comes comprehension... or does it? Perhaps, if we were to retain that sense of curiosity towards the world around us, at the expense of our current understanding, would that be a good exchange? To find that there is something new to discover everyday, something interesting to explore and to savour the unique place everything potentially has in this world – such child-like curiosity has left us a long time ago, back when we were still green and ignorant. Perhaps it would be a fair trade to return to such ignorance, if we were to better appreciate the beauty and the mysteriousness of a sunset, apparently just another common scenery with no place in our hearts.
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