I just taught my daughter to eat a muffin. I have also taught her recently how to wear her socks, tuck in her shirt, and things of that nature. In her entire life of 7 years and 5 months, I have taught my daughter things that need no teaching (for she would have figured them out by herself anyway), but still there are techniques and tricks I have learnt that make life easier, or are just easier for me to do, or to teach.
Either way, the way to eat a muffin is to open it up only a quarter and bite into it from the side, rotating it as you go and opening up more and more, allowing you to close up the butter-paper wrapper once you are done, so you can keep the rest of the muffin moist for the next time. About tucking in a shirt, one has to hold the shirttails between one’s legs as one carefully pulls up the trousers and opens the legs to straighten the shirt, after which one may close up the top button and use the zipper opening to insert one’s hands to flatten the creases before using one’s thumbs to further smoothen it, moving from front to back. Then, there are similar rules for socks-before-trousers and so on. Many ways to make things easier, or perhaps those are the ways I figured make things easier for me, or have made things easier for me in the past.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I believe she will grow up with the impression that there is only one right way of doing this, and anyone who does this in any other way is not just wrong, but needs correction. That she will grow up with a set of rules to do simple things that can be done in a zillion different ways believing only her way to be right because that’s how she was taught it and that is how her Baba did it.
Take this to an extreme and you see why almost every religion has copious text to tell you how to drink water, take off your shoes, which foot to enter with, how to have a bath or clean yourself, how to greet someone, what kind of clothes to wear and how to wear them, how and what to cook, what day of the week to cut one’s nails, and so on: things that one would think had not just a single right way to be done right. Indeed, some of the detail these texts go into in terms of how something ought to be done can be confusing to someone who wonders why supposedly wise men giving life lessons and founding apparent philosophical/ideological/political/military movements went to such great lengths to tell you such simple stuff. And claim that this particular way of doing something oddly specific has come directly from some divine source.
I have now decided that I shall, as much as practically possible, teach my daughter two ways to do stuff, as well as ask her to ‘invent’ her own way and demonstrate it to me so I know she has been thinking laterally and for herself as well. This should act like a minor armour from conditioning, though I am fully aware that it will not shield her entirely and she needs to grow up and do her thing to shake off her conditioning by herself. That’s on her. And I hope she succeeds as she flowers into a rational-thinking and -acting adult.
Inshallah!
