When Did You Last Experience Curiosity and Wonder?

Curiosity and wonder

A pumpkin hanging from its vine at Evergreen, halfway up a silver birch tree. Now it's slowly ripening in the sun. How curious! What a wonder!

To be curious means to care enough about something that you inquire diligently and eagerly into it.

When we were children we were curious about everything. A cupboard of cooking pots, a storm drain on the roadside, our own ten toes.

Now that we’ve grown up, we seldom feel the pull of curiosity. We’ve learned to ignore it when it pops up because we believe that we don’t have enough time to enquire diligently and eagerly into it.

For example, when I go into the garden it’s either to snip spent flowers, plant new seedlings before they get root-bound or pick a salad while there’s still enough light for me to distinguish between deadly foxglove leaves and edible greens. Although the garden is bursting with curiosities like a bright yellow insect waving its antennae my way, a small dark brown frog that just leapt onto my hand or a pumpkin vine twisting up the trunk of the silver birch, I have no time to pause awhile to pursue the beckoning tease of curiosity.

But when I lie in bed at night and recall these things I realise that a few moments spent in contemplation of these curiosities would have enriched the day.

John O’Donohue wrote in Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace:

If we can free ourselves from our robot-like habits of predictability, repetition and function, we begin to walk differently on the earth.

To a large degree, my days are ruled by robot-like habits of predictability, repetition and function. A trip into the garden to pick a salad could be a daily adventure but all I focus on is the task.

It’s time for me to walk differently on the earth.

Curiosity and Wonder

In an interview on High Performance, the physicist Brian Cox quoted Einstein as saying:

If you look at nature carefully, and really pay attention, and you're lucky, you can catch a glimpse of something deeply hidden.

Curiosity changes how I experience things. I sense that what I’m looking at is looking back at me. It ceases to be an object. It is a swirl of deeply hidden energy.

I’ve noticed that when I give in to curiosity, it softens the furrows in my forehead and releases a silent zing that starts in the heart and moves throughout my whole body.

Curiosity leads me by the hand to states of wonder, reverence, gratitude, humility, presence.

The British nature writer Robert Macfarlane said in an interview:

Wonder is an essential survival skill.

If humans are to survive, we need more curiosity, more wonder – about each other and about nature and the seemingly endless cosmos that holds all things together.

A day without curiosity, and the wonder it produces, is a wasted day.

It’s time to go and pick the evening salad.

In other words, it’s time to be curious and to give in to wonder and to feel reverence and to express gratitude and to be humbled and to be present.

With love, Marlane