Badhta Bacha

 When I was a child, if ever me and my brother would get ravenously hungry, my dadi (grandma) would lovingly say, “Badhte bache h, khane do” (They are growing kids, let them eat). I always thought that you are supposed to grow up to a certain age, in my head it was 21, and by then you are supposed to learn everything that there is to learn, and then you live. For whatever reason, I always looked at it as a sequence. First, you learn (theory), then you live (practical).

I ventured into my 20s with this same thought process, thinking I am at the very end of my theory now, and I will start my practicals soon. I will start working, get married, have kids, buy stuff like a house, a car etc etc. But I have learnt almost everything that I need to. When I stepped into motherhood, I carried over the same notion of “I should know everything there is to know before I start”. But motherhood has humbled me. Motherhood has taken all of my preconceived notions and tumbled them inside out. One of them has been that of learning.

So, in my day job, I am an engineering manager. My job means being responsible for the timely delivery of the project, while making sure we follow the best practices, don’t cut any corners, and everyone gets to experience personal growth as well. 

The other day I was talking to a friend, who is my senior in this role, who just had a baby. And I told her, that if we ask a fresher, someone who is straight out of college, only knows the theory, to build an app, we will never expect them to do it as wonderfully as someone who has 20 years of experience. We expect them to make mistakes, we expect them to complicate things, to not think about scaling, to not modularize. We expect them to fail. Think of that as a welcome to the adult world. We expect them to fail, not to demean them, but because we want them to understand that theory can only take you so far. We want them to know that there is so much that they still don’t know, don’t understand, that they will only learn while working on the task. We want to set the tone right. The expectation is never for them to know everything before we start, but for them to be willing to learn things as we go. Then why do we expect life to be any different? Especially parenting? 

Why do we expect ourselves to know everything there is to know about parenting from the get go? Why do we expect ourselves to know everything there is to know about living a meaningful life from the get go? How boring would life become if we stop learning at a certain age, because what that would mean is we will keep doing all that we already know how to do. How monotonous would that be.

I understand now that my model of learning was flawed. I thought learning means first I understand the theory, then I do a practical, and then I test it by giving an exam. That's how learning used to work in school. But in life, learning looks more like this. You are thrown into a challenge, you have no clue how to solve it, you analyze the problem, you refer to everything that you have learnt so far, you try out a few solutions, one of them sticks, you learn something new, so you write it down in your brain, to refer to next time. So, in essence, it's quite the opposite of the school structure. You are pushed into an exam, where you have to then do the things practically, and once you are able to solve the problem is when you quite understand the theory. 

I am happy to say now, that I believe the day I stop learning, I should check my pulse, because there is a high chance I will be dead. As long as I am alive, I will continue to learn. This realization has freed me from all that burden I had put on myself to “know everything there is to know” before stepping into something new. It has also freed me from the guilt of not knowing the solution to every challenge of life right away. I understand now it is a process. And the best thing, it has given me a new perspective, where I feel every single challenge of my life is a great learning opportunity. Challenges still suck, but whenever I am facing a new one, I remind myself of the joy I felt when I finished my learnings from the last one. I am a much more confident person now, now that I know that I don’t need to know all the solutions, rather just need the right attitude to solve the problems. The solutions will come to me in due time. After all, at the end of the day, I am still a badhta bacha. I am still growing.