By Sharanya (Sai) Mohan

When an ordinary person comes across broken shards of glass along the road, he simply adjusts his path and continues on his way without another glance. He does not stop to think about what their history is, or how they happened to make their way to the road, or what their future use might be. Every once in a while, however, a man like Sir David Brewster comes across these neglected shards and sees in them the potential to be something beautiful. He then takes these fragments and combines them with a few mirrors and some mathematics to create the first kaleidoscope.

Ralph Waldo Emerson accurately described men like Brewster when he wrote, "The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common." As society strives to find satisfaction in reaching the outermost realms of space, in diving to the deepest stretches of the ocean, in discovering the most colorful and rarest species, those who are able to remain stable on a vacillating world are those who are able to recognize the capacity of the most prosaic and nondescript object to be miraculous. Every ant, every blade of grass has complexity and purpose that the ordinary cannot and do not take the time to understand. The ability to realize the limitations of man's greatness and appreciate this same greatness in common things is what makes a man truly wise.

One can find this exceptional ability in nearly all of those thinkers generally considered to be wise. The great Greek philosopher Aristotle once wrote, "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous." In Thoreau's writings about his self-exile at Walden Pond, he finds universal truths in the combat of ants and in the antics of a loon. These philosophers saw a complexity and an intricacy in nature, the most common element in our world, that the lay observer could not have understood; what knowledge they derived from everyday creations has been passed down to the world through their writings, and they have been eternally marked as some of the wisest men in history.

Wisdom, however, is a very difficult word to define. Some identify wisdom in scholarship and knowledge; others look for common sense, a rarer quality, as a sign of wisdom. In looking at examples of "wise" people, however, one can see that true wisdom results when one uses a combination of knowledge, common sense, experience, and judgment to understand the intricacies of one' s world. And what comprises this world? Are not common insects the most abundant of animals? Are blades of grass more prolific, or the more exotic African violets? When one wants to make sense of a set of numbers, one looks at the mean rather than the extremes. Should this principle not apply to comprehension of the world? By recognizing the importance of the commonplace, a person comes closer to understanding the core of what makes up our world, gaining wisdom along the way. The wise minority who have this understanding are able to keep their world in balance. The ordinary person picks up a flower and, if it does not appeal to his senses, discards it as worthless; the wise person realizes how difficult and amazing the existence of the flower is in itself and leaves the flower attached to its stem.

What is the use, some might ask, of finding importance in flowers and grass? I agree that in our confusing and chaotic world, one doesn't even have time to grow flowers, much less contemplate their value. However, the same ideas can be applied to mankind as a whole. Our superficial society elevates those privileged few who are extremely beautiful or intelligent or talented to unwarranted heights without so much as glancing at those of us who are average in those areas. Only the truly wise dare to explore the long-deserted alleys lined by the average citizen to find the extraordinary. Gandhi saw miraculous strength in the poverty-stricken and undereducated masses of his country and he channeled this strength towards the goal of independence rather than using a select army. Learning from him, Martin Luther King recognized that the common black man had the power to change the entire country. Even in the eighteenth century, the framers of our constitution realized the mistake of allowing a select genetic line or a specific class run the government and avoided this mistake by placing the government in the hands of the general public. In fact, the whole principle of democracy acknowledges the power of the common man to run his nation. The reason these men succeeded is that they had the ability to find something wonderful in what the less sagacious would have overlooked.

Even these great men, however, would argue that some creatures, some flowers, some people, are just more exceptional than others. What the wise man realizes is that, although uniqueness and inequalities make life interesting, every single thing, no matter how banal or how exotic, has something miraculous in its creation, function, and existence. The wise man has the capacity to look for the unique and unusual in a certain situation and to go for tried and tested commonality in another. The wise man, when confronted with depravity, can find joy in what he has. To the wise man, the world is his kaleidoscope, with each of God's creations falling together at just the right angle to reflect the sun's light in a miraculous pattern of dancing colors.

Sharanya(Sai)Mohan, is a 11th grade student at Dulles High School, Houston, Texas, USA. She is into writing poems and short essays from the age of 9, and has published some of them in Local News Papers and Magazines. She is a A+ student and her favourite subjects are Chemistry and English. She is the daughter of Pushpa and Mohan Subrmaniam, and grand daughter of scientist Late Dr.T.R.Subramaniam