keep a little wonder

Leave room in your life for something to astonish you. 

There is a peculiar thing that happens as we grow older.

We become very good at knowing what things are.

A bird is a bird.

A puddle is a puddle.

A dandelion is a weed.

A cloud is water vapor.

A stone is a stone.

We learn names.

Categories.

Explanations.

We learn how things work.

And all of that knowledge is wonderful.

But somewhere along the way, if we aren’t careful, knowing what something is can make us forget to marvel that it exists at all.

Remember When Everything Was New?

There was a time when you didn’t know the moon would follow you home.

You had to discover it.

There was a first time you watched a caterpillar inch across your hand.

A first firefly.

A first seashell held to your ear.

A first snowfall.

A first rainbow.

A first time you blew the seeds from a dandelion and watched them disappear into the air.

The world had not yet become ordinary.

A cardboard box could become a ship.

A stick could become a wand.

A patch beneath a table could become a secret kingdom.

You didn’t need much.

Imagination did most of the work.

Perhaps it still can.

Wonder Didn’t Leave

I don’t think wonder disappears when we grow up.

I think our attention gets crowded.

There are appointments now.

Bills.

Phones.

Laundry.

Deadlines.

Groceries.

Things that need fixing.

People who need us.

Questions without easy answers.

We walk past extraordinary things because we have somewhere else to be.

The spiderweb jeweled with morning dew.

The perfect spiral inside a shell.

The tiny green shoot pushing through a crack in concrete.

The way starlings somehow turn together in the sky without colliding.

The fingerprints on our own hands.

The fact that someone can make marks on a page and another human being, perhaps hundreds of years later, can hear their thoughts.

None of that became less extraordinary.

We simply became accustomed to it.

Look Again

Perhaps wonder is not about finding more remarkable things.

Perhaps it is about looking more closely at the things already here.

Turn the leaf over.

Look underneath the mushroom.

Watch what happens when sunlight passes through a glass of water.

Listen to rain without doing anything else.

Pick up the stone.

Study the crack.

Look at someone’s face when they don’t know you’re watching them laugh.

Lie on the ground and look upward.

Look through something instead of at it.

Ask the question a child would ask.

Why does it do that?

Where did that come from?

What would happen if…?

And perhaps my favorite:

Have you ever really looked at this?

You Don’t Have to Explain Everything

Curiosity does not always need to end in an answer.

Sometimes knowing more makes something even more astonishing.

Sometimes mystery is allowed to remain mystery.

You can understand how a seed germinates and still be amazed that an entire tree was somehow waiting inside something small enough to hold between two fingers.

You can understand the science of stars and still stand beneath them speechless.

You can know exactly how pigment moves through water and still watch watercolor bloom across wet paper as though you’ve never seen it before.

Knowledge and wonder are not enemies.

Sometimes knowledge simply gives us more things to wonder about.

Make Something Useless

This may be important.

Do something occasionally for absolutely no productive reason.

Draw a face on a pebble.

Build something tiny.

Arrange leaves by color.

Invent a ridiculous word.

Photograph the reflection in a spoon.

Make a creature from a clothespin.

Paint something nobody will ever buy.

Write four terrible lines of poetry and enjoy them enormously.

Dance badly in the kitchen.

Make a shadow animal with your hands.

Put googly eyes on something that clearly does not need googly eyes.

Not everything has to improve you.

Not everything has to become content.

Not everything has to earn money.

Not everything has to be good.

Some things are allowed to exist because for five minutes they made being alive more interesting.

Protect Your Astonishment

The world will offer plenty of reasons to become hardened.

There will be disappointments.

Loss.

Things you wish you could unknow.

Days when beauty seems terribly small compared with everything that hurts.

Wonder does not ask us to deny any of that.

It isn’t naïveté.

It is not pretending darkness doesn’t exist.

It is deciding that darkness will not be permitted to make us blind to everything else.

There is still a bird building a nest somewhere.

Still a child discovering their toes.

Still someone falling in love.

Still bread rising.

Still seeds splitting open underground.

Still moonlight landing on water.

Still an old person remembering something that makes them laugh like they are twenty again.

Still people making music.

Still people making art.

Still people making magic for one another.

The world remains capable of terrible things.

And somehow—

it remains capable of this, too.

Keep a Little

You don’t need to recover the wonder you had as a child.

Perhaps adult wonder is different.

It knows more.

It has lost things.

It understands impermanence.

Maybe that makes noticing beauty even more important.

Because now we know:

The flower will wilt.

The firefly will disappear.

The child will grow.

The season will turn.

The people we love will not be here forever.

Neither will we.

So look.

Really look.

Let yourself be delighted by something small.

Let yourself ask questions without needing to appear knowledgeable.

Let yourself make ridiculous things.

Let yourself stop beside the road because the sky is doing something extraordinary.

There is no prize for becoming impossible to impress.

Growing older may teach us what things are.

May we never become too grown to wonder that they are here at all.

FOR YOUR POCKET

KEEP A LITTLE WONDER

Turn the leaf over.

Look at the moon.

Ask another question.

Make something useless.

Notice what everyone else walked past.

You do not have to understand
everything that amazes you.

Stay astonishable.