Walking is too difficult, I continue crawling

A friend of mine has a one-year-old baby who has just learned to walk. My friend wondered what it would be like if the baby had said after falling a few times, “This walking thing is too difficult, I’ll continue with crawling.”

The baby doesn’t understand concepts like ‘difficult’, ‘failure’ or even ‘self.’ These concepts don’t exist for the baby. The baby just falls and tries again. Falling provides feedback on how to adjust balance. The baby takes the situation as it is, without any mental burden and learns to walk.

There must be a reason why motor skills develop in humans before conceptual skills. If thinking and creating concepts first were more beneficial, natural selection would have shaped us that way. If that were the case then the baby encouraged himself by saying, “Come on, I can do it! I can learn to walk!” but whole learning process would be overlaid by this mental discussion instead of using all his potential to learn to walk.

As adults, learning new things can be a bit like that reversed natural selection. We have concepts like ‘difficult’, ‘failure’ and ‘self’ occupying our minds during the learning process, which hinders our learning or results to giving up. When one masters their own mind, they could learn with the same attitude as a baby does.