I have always wondered why children are deemed as God’s greatest creation. Is it because they are innocent and unspoiled by the politics of life? Or because they’re blessed with an open mind and they think in whichever direction they want to? My seven-year old niece is my only real connect to that world and every interaction with her leaves me amused and amazed. She speaks and acts with a lot of maturity and her seemingly innocent questions make me push my mental boundaries to the limit. You know how kids are – highly inquisitive and curious for no specific reason. The other day she was asking me why an Indian goddess has six pairs of hands and gets to sit on a tiger whereas she doesn’t. I tried hard to provide a logical answer but failed on more than one count.

But something that she said the last time I met her set me thinking. She asked me very innocently why I was planning for the next month, or week and more specifically, for tomorrow. Her premise was naïve, yet thought provoking. She wanted to know what will happen tomorrow. How do we know tomorrow will be the same as today or yesterday? Or how do ‘adults’ know whether tomorrow will be happy or sad, exciting or boring, or just the same as today was? She went on prodding and I really had no clear answer. She triumphantly marched out of the room with her wisecrack – ‘When you don’t know what tomorrow will be like, why are you wasting time brooding over it? Let us continue playing Angry Birds’.

Isn’t it amazing how a seven-year old posed a deep philosophical problem and also provided a practical solution to it in a jiffy? I love the fact that children don’t restrict themselves to boxed thinking like adults. I feel the phrase ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking was coined for adults to force themselves to think like a child i.e. unrestricted by any logic and free from worldly boundaries. After all, brainstorming means one has to go beyond the ordinary and come up with the unthinkable. But it seems my niece was testing and questioning my fundamentals!

In fact I myself am a proponent of the theory of enjoying your present. Some of my close friends know my habit of throttling them with it whenever they are depressed. I sincerely believe that the cause for most misery in today’s world is the fear of the unknown, more specifically, the future. But the weird part in this equation is that we tend to waste the present moment (which is real and controllable) in brooding over the future (which is imaginary and beyond our control). If you understand the depth of this simple but powerful logic and imbibe it, I can guarantee that your depression would be reduced by a large extent. Of course no one can promise instant wealth or fame or success with this philosophy.

But then, will brooding over it solve anything anyway?