A superpower hidden in plain sight!

When you think of a superpower, is the first person who comes to mind either Batman or Superman? Leave a comment below if I guessed correctly (or not), and please keep on reading as this piece may truly surprise you.

Humans are creatures of habit by nature. What I mean by that is the fact that most of us like consistency and we tend to do things the same exact way once we know such a way actually works. We often hear it is best to "work smarter than harder", right? (I will elaborate on this one in a bit.)

Imagine taking a specific scenic route every day coming home from work where you get to be in your car and listen to your favorite radio station while contemplating the encounters you had that day or planning for the family evening. Such a route home you have been taking every day for months; if not years now; suddenly undergoes renovation and therefore is no longer accessible to traffic ("ROAD WORK" sign in sight). What do you do then?

If you know your way around well, you can still easily navigate through an alternative route without the need for GPS to get home to your family. In a case where the route you were used to taking is the only paved way to get to your house, then you may have a bigger problem to solve and you may even need to park your car on a side of the road and start walking (hopefully your walk is not through the woods).

You may ask: where are you getting with this? Let me explain...

This is where the hidden superpower comes in place to talk about.

Anyone should be able to confirm that they can relate to the story about the driving route. What is interesting here is that for anyone who is either bilingual or better yet- multilingual, such a story may paint a better-related concept as scientists confirm that the brains of those people have lots of neuro-connectors that work exactly in such a way that can relate to the situation described above. Any person who uses more than one language consistently will easily find the links between the memories they created through culturally sensitive interactions, words they used in two or more languages they communicate in, and various experiences they have gathered across two or more languages. Such can be switched back and forth easily.

You see now where I am going with this?

Bilingualism/multilingualism is a superpower hidden in plain sight that many of us who speak more than one language truly take for granted.

Lots of people who grow up in bilingual homes and have exposure to more than one culture, get to acquire knowledge of additional foreign languages later in life much easier than those who chose to pick a learning of a language later in life. They tend to be more culturally aware than those who maneuver through the world with one language as their method of communication. Speaking more than one language has many more advantages: from creating the foundation for their identity, shaping the way people learn and how they see the world around them, or even how they manage their emotions and how they make decisions; just to mention a few here. Speaking more than one language gives people a wider perspective on things and promotes creative thinking. I bet nobody will try to correct me when I say that languages undoubtedly have a huge impact on our brains.

Did you know that using more than one language can delay Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia by four to six years? Ha, there you have health benefits associated with speaking foreign languages.

So, what are you doing with your superpowers? Are you using them to their best potential? How much effort are you putting into promoting cultural sensitivity and identity built on the solid foundation of a language? There is never enough of it. Some of you may even say that English is considered as being the world's universal language...I am going to leave this one here (parked just like that car by the woods for now)...

To those of you who may not speak another language I have a tiny piece of advice: it is never too late to learn a foreign language as such a process is the best investment one can make for themselves. Consider this gift-giving next time you think of yourself.