How to Embrace Wonder
Curiosity, staring, and trees
“Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe.” Abraham Joshua Heschel
My life is not full of wonder. I’m much better at curiosity. In our age, curiosity is more easily satiated: if I want to learn about the Ottoman Empire or the weight of a hummingbird, I can speak or type a question and get an answer. I regularly go climbing, which is a series of curiosity: can I get up this? Or make this move? What if I try it this way? In fact, sports in general are a land of curiosity—we question our bodies, our teams, what’s next.
Science is a land of curiosity, whether we can cure cancer or how to slow global warming. We have incredible amounts of knowledge at our literal fingertips — more than any era of human before. This knowledge is making us healthier, certainly.
Is it making us happier?
Wiser?
For this, I believe Rabbi Heschel is right. In fact, curiosity had negative senses throughout the Middle Ages: people could lust after knowledge just as Eve plucked the fruit from the tree in Genesis 3 because her eyes would be opened, and she would be like God, knowing good and evil. Heschel also writes how humans have “now become primarily a tool-making animal, and the world is now a gigantic tool-box for the satisfaction of [their] needs.”
If curiosity is the desire to learn and explore new things—which is a good desire, by the way—wonder is the desire to behold. To give regard to something, to look, to gaze. To hold it in our minds. If curiosity is movement, wonder and its cousin awe are a sense of watching and looking. They require patience. Quiet. Meditation.
An act of patience always repositions us. It invites us to see that our desires are not the standard of good and bad in the world. The writer Flannery O’Connor writes, “The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.” That is, the writer must be attuned to the world, must stare at it, gaze at it, behold it, wonder at it. We all have read books where the writer did not wonder at the world but simply tried to get an idea across or, even worse, write a book that would sell.
And if this produces poor writing, what about a poor life? Writers are merely the ones giving voice to the world; the non-writers need just as much to stare, only they don’t go and write about it.
If you’re up by 6 a.m. in the summer in Colorado, you’ll see the sun unobscured and brilliant, but you don’t see it by staring at it. You see it by looking at the trees, which seem to be glowing themselves, a thousand shades of green: from a gray-green, almost sage, on the undersides of the leaves to mint green to a fluorescent green luminous at the outermost and highest leaves, those directly in the sunlight. I know this because I’ve sat outside at 6 a.m. and watched the leaves, a cup of good coffee next to me, our dog sniffing in the grass. I know this because I’ve taken the time to stare.
And while I’m a writer, this isn’t simply a writer’s practice. We could use a good bit more staring. And wondering. And patience as we do so. For this generally results in the awe that Heschel is himself writing about: the repositioning of my self away from the center and into something greater. An act of patience and profligacy.
My wife is reading The Artist’s Way, a classic book on spirituality and creativity. Throughout, it has exercises and prompts. She’s told me about the exercise of remembering moments when you were told your creativity was not good. This happens to most of us as children, whether implicitly or explicitly. We learn to fit in rather than stand out.
She also mentioned an exercise of listing 20 things you love to do. Some, you may have done recently. Some, it may have been years. Behind this list, the idea of play sits waiting to be discovered. Joy. A freeness to life that we don’t capture holding tight to other things we think make us free: money, time, our liberties. What would be on your list?
After checking off some of the usual suspects—things you may have prioritized and still do—and things you did as a child that you’ve forgotten about—what makes it?
Drinking good coffee?
Looking at the stars?
Lingering after a meal with those you love?
What things instill not simply enjoyment but deep gratitude—a gratitude that speaks to how lucky you are, that speaks to who the Giver behind the veil of this near and present life may be? A gratitude that invites wonder because you are no longer master of this ship we call life, and the immensity of the stars can invite a sense of awe and even gratitude, but so can the moment of quiet after an evening with friends, the feel of a fountain pen over good paper, the way sunlight riots a tree with color and brightness.
What makes your list after you’ve sat with it for more than five minutes?
Did you want to Google or look on Chat GPT for things you love, or things other people love? What is that about?
It’s about curiosity, isn’t it? The way we’ve trained ourselves to satiate our curiosity in a matter of moments. Curiosity is like an itch that needs to be scratched. Wonder and awe, however, invite us to be humans in tension, to recognize that our questions extend beyond our reach, that the beauty of what we enjoy—if we’ll allow it—does not simply scratch an itch but goes much deeper. It positions us as people without all the answers, and in need not of more answers, but of more wonder. We are in need to see the world itself as a sacrament, a means of grace, a carrier of beauty, an invitation not to simply make more tools to satisfy ourselves but to wonder at the mystery and meaning behind it.
Doing things you love can help get you there, if you accompany them with watching. With patience. With a wonder at what’s unfolding around you today.
There will be opportunities for wonder next week, Gabe!