Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [81]
A life with wonder is simply more fun than one without. Remember those days when you woke feeling that nothing could go right, and then something comical or beautiful or strange caught your eye and you looked, and looked again? It only takes an instant, but it is transformative.
A Daily Practice
We all experience moments of grace, transcendence, awareness. Our challenge, however, if we want to keep “living now” when we think the world is going to hell in a hand basket and we’re certain all hope is gone, is to find ways to create those moments. Everyday. This doesn’t sound like an easy proposition. How do I even remember to wonder, I wonder? But it’s not that hard. It requires of us the eyes of a child, of a beginner, of a newbie. And we’ve been those things before so we have a great deal of experience to draw on. It requires of us simply to look. To look again.
Practice, unsurprisingly, is the key. Here’s a personal confession: I live in wonder. Not always. Certainly not twenty-four hours a day. But daily. Sometimes I have thought maybe I was born that way, that perhaps it came from my upbringing, or the jobs I’ve had, or is a strange accident of chemistry and circumstance. But I now realize that it is because I make wonder a daily practice. Especially when I’m feeling down or blue or lost, I just buckle down and practice wonder.
My Wonder “Workout”
I spent many years working in the “sense of wonder business,” as an interpretive naturalist in Canada’s spectacular national parks. My job was to inspire in park visitors a sense of wonder about the natural world they were visiting, the idea being that one protects what one loves and that, with their latent sense of wonder awakened, these same visitors would form a constituency of conservation for the national parks themselves, as well as for nature as a whole. It’s a fine idea, and one that, sadly, is rather difficult to justify in meetings about budgets and national objectives.
Nevertheless, through that work I discovered some basic tools that may help you as you try to “live now,” with wonder and awe in your daily life. I offer them to you here as a kind of practical workout for wonder. Some of them are a bit goofy, but give them a try. If you have other wonder-building exercises, tell me.
Investigate the world upside down. You can do this by hooking your legs over a railing and leaning back, dangling from a tree branch if you’re young enough or strong enough, by standing on your head like a yogi, or any other way you can think of. Do it for long enough that this vantage point becomes your new “normal” perspective—images compressed into a thin band at the top of the picture (trees, laundry hanging on a line, cars going past).
Surprise yourself. Leave yourself a sticky note. Seed your living space (and your coat pockets) with oddities, curiosities, things you might forget about and then encounter. Choose something that won’t mold, melt, or rot. Chocolate is enticing, but impractical. You need something like an unusually colored pebble, an acorn, a piece of beach glass, a bottle cap, a matchbook from a nefarious place you visited, the seed of a particularly curious plant.
Spend the day with a mystic, lunatic, or writer. Or, for that matter, a child (who, if schooling and society don’t manage to weld shut his door to amazement, will no doubt one day become a mystic, lunatic, or writer). These people have their heads screwed on sideways and hobble around gobsmacked by the beauty and despair of the world. If you opt to spend the day with a child, try to find a small one, preferably raised by hippies on a commune on the coast, but really any child will work, if you actually pay