Wonder

Sometimes I am outside and an airplane cruises by overhead.  Some proportion of these times I look up at the airplane with a true sense of wonder.  That's a giant thing of metal racing across the sky at ridiculous speed full of people.  It's a gleaming machine in the sky.  It is amazing.

Sometimes I am in the damn thing waiting for it to get back on the ground.

The sense of wonder, of a sudden appreciation for the amazing qualities of something, is an emotion that almost everyone agrees is good, positive, worthy of cultivation.  The cliched ideal for wonder is that of a child.  It is absolutely true that young children experience wonder more than any other group, but I think that is largely down to there being such a vast amount of things to encounter for the first time.  Show a two year old a sheep and the two year old will be amazed.  Show an adult a sheep (with the exception of my darling wife) and that adult will not be filled with a sense of wonder.



For me the key is how do you maintain a sense of wonder with regard to the things you have already experienced many times?  I don't think I have any great answers here, I think this one is tricky.  My best guess would be to take the time to notice what is going on around you and think of what it really consists.  That person across the table from you grew from a single cell, too small for you to see, into a vastly complex thing, made from something like 50,000,000,000,000 cells, that can imagine what you might be thinking.  When driving to work you are in a machine constructed from materials from around the world, in ways you don't understand, that can move faster than a galloping horse while you sit in an armchair.  The snot you just picked from your nose is constructed of atoms forged in the nuclear fires of a sun billions of years ago.