I am teaching 'reflective practice' these days. That's all I have been thinking about. How to get students to practice reflection? When I look back on my distant past, no one ever told me to reflect. Or showed me how to. I started reading as a kid. That's when it perhaps started. I enjoyed reading. Around the same time, I discovered my love of writing. Scribbling all sorts of things that came into my head in my 'diary' (I think I stopped the diary ritual only when I started this blog). The reading, writing, reflecting almost went hand in hand. Maybe I should add intensely pondering on experience? I remember reading chapters from the Bible (which was one big book of stories for me!) and writing my thoughts down. Or reading poems and copying my favourite lines. Or recording interesting quotes in a file. And so on. Turning them in my head, chewing them with my pen. Nobody ever told me to read or reflect or write or think or be critical or anything. Not at home, not in school, not in college. Our Indian education system wasn’t designed for that sort of stuff anyway. I was chastised rather for being 'argumentative' or always hanging out with books. Maybe writing was a way to talk about the things I was thinking about with myself... making sense of them. Once I discovered a love of this kind of thinking/talking by writing, I couldn't stop. Like a child who doesn't have to be told to love candy or ice cream. So how do I teach anyone to love it...? I can only expose them to it maybe...

I am conscious that the world I am referring to is a different world. Nobody may have told me anything or shown me anything but for a curious mind, all this was stimulation. These days with so much ready stimulation in the form of social media and what not, maybe kids do not have the space to explore for themselves these deeper joys, to focus on one thing like reading or to focus their thinking somewhere like writing or just to get to know one’s own thoughts.

An interesting analogy popped in my head. Reflecting is now like breathing for me, not like drinking water. You can forget to drink water or drink it from time to time. You don't forget to breathe... you don't even know you are breathing...