Leave Space for Wonder

We've touched on the idea of "wonder" a few times -- and, well, why stop at a few times? Really, we could devote an entire blog to nothing but wonder and we'd hardly even scratch the surface. Wonder is...large.

The thing is, most of the "adult world" -- regardless of where you live -- is dominated by reason and scientific cause-and-effect thinking. In fact, it underlies our cultures so much that we don't even notice it; it absorbs and in some ways co-opts even those pursuits that are traditionally thought of as abstract or, you know, out there; things like fine art, or dance, or poetry, or music, and so on. So it's really, in a way, greater or lesser degrees of left-brain dominated behavior. It's the very lens through which we see our worlds.

Because of this lens, we tend to distance ourselves-- if not outright reject or ridicule -- the idea of wonder; the idea that things can happen synchronistically (or "acausal"); that there is indeed logic, but above our logic is an even higher logic -- a kind of logic about logic; a metalogic, we could say, that is quite "logical" unto itself, but to us, appears as...strange as human language must seem to the family dog.

The consequence of this "no wonder living" isn't that wonder somehow disappears from the planet; it's that we become immune to it; oblivious to it. And we stop allowing ourselves to participate in a world in which...strange, wonderful things can happen. And then we resign ourselves to living in a world with no surprises, with no strangeness, with no unbelievable things -- with no wonder.

Bring little pieces of wonder back into your life. Always leave ROOM in your life for the wonder to show up. Yes, you may have a serious job and have serious things to do -- that's fine. But deep inside your heart, remember the basic fact that life itself on this planet is fundamentally, uncategorically, unarguably ABSURD whether you're a creationist or evolutionist or whatever-ist else you could be. It just really doesn't make sense.

And, hopefully, it never really will.