There is a generally accepted view that adults function as ego-laden objects. The ego weighs the adult down and renders the brain senseless to elevating emotions of openness and self-confidence. This mental deadweight is further piled on by a cloying diet of flattery from juniors and people who need you to drop them to the airport. Recognising this adult trait, training workshops employ techniques tailored specifically for adult learning. Adult learning is different from children’s learning because it involves adults, copious use of powerpoints, notepads used to write down more than grocery lists, and doodles drawn with the last drops of your fellow trainee’s pen. However, the outcomes of most of these workshops are dubious at best since adults can be told to do many things on this not-so-green earth which they will loudly agree are good and proper but the sneakiest part of being an adult is that they do not have to do those things unless handed an official notice by a legal authority or their neighbor.
The course of my life has been steered (by a trained hand no doubt) to cause me in the recent months to manage a series of training workshops, an experience that can accurately be described as life-changing. I have often sat at the back of these workshops and dreamt of what I would do if I changed my life, if I had enough money to open that coffee shop and dabble in many golden delights like playing the drums, talking of air and light with friendly strangers and making coffee all day; of sampling amuse bouches of life rather than a bland diet of fixed experiences, of whether I should have pursued that career in chemistry instead of thinking that “helping” people is the greatest reward and so on. These are nagging thoughts and being a person who overthinks everything, the ample time offered for overthinking in the back of a training hall while grown adults unsuccessfully try to solve a 12-piece jigsaw square in the front, surreptitiously judge each other and keep asking for a tea break causes the overthought to slowly build as bodily pressure that must be released in some mechanical way.Having never screamed like the mythical banshee or a girl who has seen the latest movie heartthrob up close, my desire to use this vocal method of stress relieving is fanned more with every passing workshop. In the next two months, I feel as if I must needs become that species of humanity I detest, the attention-seeker. Screaming is like attention-seeking basic procedure.
Attention-seekers can be found in various settings, clicking selfies in front of coffee shops, stuttering around malls in orthopedically unsound high heels, enacting facetious dialogues from old movies in training workshops and in those people who “are going to drink just a little because I’m so over everything” and can then be found sobbing into the sleeve of the bouncer before running down the street indrunken abandon followed by their sober, somewhat envious, eye-rolling designated driver friend.
However, attention-seeker may not be the right word for such people. Perhaps they too lead tortured lives and have been forced to undergo the life-equivalent of an adult training workshop. The despair that I feel is perhaps akin to their feelings before they drown their sorrows in behaviours that I previously and erroneously labeled as attention-seeking. Unknowingly and most definitely unwittingly, they are the Socratic gadflies in our lives that bang into us as they drunkenly careen down the street and remind us that being awkward is a blessing since we are never as acutely and tinglingly alive as when we are about to trip over an object or a drunk person. It is an experience that mimics childhood in its similarly uncoordinated and brazen innocence. We must recreate such experiences more often and seek out these people. They are the true trainers and have much to teach us. It’ll be free as well.
