WHAT I LEARNED FROM SONIC THE HEDGEHOG

What relation are your cousin’s children? I want to say they’re ‘second’ cousins... but that was surprisingly controversial the last time I floated it with someone! I don’t want to get into an argument.

So, let’s call them kiblings. Same generation as niblings, just another branch over.

I don’t know how many kiblings I have on my Dad’s side. On my Mum’s side though, there are definitely two. And yesterday, one of them spent twenty minutes breathlessly telling me about Sonic the Hedgehog.

I now know about rares and super rares, about Tails and Knuckles, and emerald chests, and rings, and the thing that freezes you with ice. I know about boosts and fireballs, about shadow hedgehogs and epics and special moves. In wide-eyed excitement, he lectured me and I listened intently, trying to grasp a world I haven’t seen since I was thirteen.

“My friends and I had a Sega Megadrive,” said I. I might as well have told him I had a trebuchet and a bucket of apples. It even amused me how ancient those words seemed - a ‘mega drive’. That’s what you need to get from one end of the M4 to the other, I suppose. What would it have to do with a cartoon hedgehog?

I remember Sonic being a game that messed with my senses. You had to be quick, and there were always things happening, bright, flashing events, everywhere on the screen, all the time. I was never any good. I would speed into obstacles deliberately and laugh like a hyena, just to wind up my friends and amuse myself when they then got really grumpy.

I wonder what happened to them? They stopped talking to me after a while, as I remember. Life is full of mystery, when I think about it.

Anyway, it brought back a few bewildering and funny memories. And also, a thought. 

The human brain can remember a frightening amount of stuff when it wants to! I had been impressed by a non-stop twenty minute exposé of Sonic the Hedgehog - a reasonably complex and confusing world that I didn’t understand and could only barely grasp. What if it had been special relativity? Or capital cities? Or maths, or music theory? Would I have been even more impressed by my kibling’s capacity for learning? And is it any different?

Another thought struck me too: my Sonic expert didn’t once pick up a clue from me that it might not be quite as interesting to me, as he found it. And that’s understandable; he’s eight. But... how often do we stop ourselves as adults, from talking passionately because we presume that it’s boring for others? Why?

Too often perhaps. And I don’t know why. I made a mental note to think about neat ways of explaining how relativity gets you to energy-mass-equivalence (E=mc²), without using any of those words. I also made a stronger note to self, to remind me never to squash someone else’s passion because I might be bored.

Einstein once said that if you can’t explain something simply, then you haven’t fully understood it.

Then, would he have come up with that if he’d spent his days playing Sonic the Hedgehog instead of postulating that light travels at exactly the same observable speed, regardless of how fast you are moving when you measure it, leading to physical effects such as time and space bending, and matter consisting of energy?

Ha! There you go. Always look for the passion and the person first, even if the detail makes no sense at all. At least, that’s what I think.