VIII. At Our Best… ↑
61. We retain a sense of wonder.
The New Oxford American Dictionary defines “wonder” as:
a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable.
And part of being human is to experience this sense of wonder about the universe around us.
As we grow and develop, things that once seemed wonderful to us might over time become well known and routine.
And yet…
No matter how much we learn, how much we develop, wonder always seems to be still available to us, when we stop to look for it.
Because the cosmos — including we humans who occupy one small corner of it — is always in some sense larger and more complex — has more breadth and depth to it — than any one of us can ever fully absorb.
Words from Others on this Topic
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake, 1863, from the poem “Auguries of Innocence”
A mind is blown when something you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.
Michael Chabon, 2004, from the speech “Chabon Keynote at Eisner Awards”
One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.
G. K. Chesterton, 1903, from Robert Browning
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