wonder

We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.” ― G.K. Chesterton.

Responding with wonderment is a natural response for a child. You don’t have to be taught how to do it. They respond this way because everything is a new experience to them. Everything is out of the ordinary. But to keep this response as the world grows more familiar and the media bombards us with extremes, we must learn to seach for the wonder in the world. Schools don’t teach the wonder out of us, but too often they fail to teach us how to find it!

via Habits of Mind

So, how do you learn to wonder again? How do you find wonder when the world has become too familiar, the promises too far out of reach, too rarely fulfilled, in the light of the knowledge that it once was everywhere?

Well, he responds predictably, how about doing something fun? Anything. Taking a nap, maybe, first. Then a walk in a place where you can look, just look, or touch, or taste or, smell, or, you know, feel things like the sun and wind and your body moving.

Now is always new. Never then. Step back into it. Pretend something. Pretend that you are a camera, everything you see, every movement of your eyes, every saccade part of the recording, everything you hear captured. In real time. Pretend you are the director, framing and focusing on each moment, each effect, each change in light, each shadow. Pretend you are in a theater, and you are watching it all in iMax 3D. The camera pans down. You see the sidewalk sparkling in the sun, moving at the edge of a shadow, framing a single scintillation. It is your shadow. Wonder of wonders, it is yours.