“Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

-Ray Bradbury

Let’s check in with our sense of wonder. Is it still there? On a scale from one to ten with one being “no wonder” to ten being “full of wonder”, where do you fall?

How do we lose our sense of wonder? Does it happen slowly or all at once? As we grow up, life becomes way more serious. We start to see the obstacles, the challenges, the failures, the heartbreaks. With each eye-opening experience we face, our sense of wonder begins to fade. We grow up, get a job, pay the bills, have children, worry about their future, our future, our jobs, our relationships, etc. Life gets hard. Worry replaces wonder. It’s disheartening. We grind, we slump, we fall, we fail. At first, our ability to get back up, dust ourselves off, and get back in the game isn’t so hard. But as the years go by, all the challenges that we’ve faced start to take their toll on us and what once was our optimism.

How much can you relate to this? I hope not at all, to be honest. But for some of us, it will resonate more than we care to admit. It’s time to take our sense of wonder back. If we can shift from worry to wonder, the level of energy we have to enjoy our experience of life will dramatically increase. Our ability to deal with all that it has to offer will become much easier.

If we can pause just for a moment and tap into that wider lens that we had as a child, we may be able to see that wonder still exists. It was always there. We just couldn’t see it through our temporary tunnel vision. Curiosity fuels our wonder. Think about life, the universe, the past, the future with curiosity and without judgment. The more we wonder and cultivate curiosity, the more we will see the wonderful and inspiring things in life that bring us joy and peace, even in all its imperfections and hard lessons learned.

Life is an experience and with that comes infinite possible outcomes. Some we will judge as good and some we will judge as bad. But the truth is they are all just experiences, and in all experiences a purpose can always be found. If we use our wider lens of how we see the world, we can find that all life experiences bring forth awe and wonder and can bring us closer to knowing who we really are in the world. We are imperfect, magnificent, complex creatures inhabiting a world in this massive universe which never ends. How cool is that?

By embracing our sense of wonder and curiosity, we further illuminate the possibilities already in front of us that we couldn’t see before. It helps us change our glance from focusing on challenges to focusing on what transcends them. It puts the big picture into perspective.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s quite a miracle we’re even here at all. Let’s cherish our time, cherish our curiosity that fuels our wonder, and cherish all that this wild experience has to offer.

“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”

-e. e. cummings