Santiago Ramon y Cajal, one of the founders of modern neuroscience concepts, famously said:
"How many interesting facts fail to be converted into fertile discoveries because their first observers regarded them as natural and ordinary things! It is strange to see how the populace, which nourishes its imagination with tales of witches or saints, disdains the world around it as commonplace, monotonous and prosaic, without suspecting that at bottom it is all secret, mystery, and marvel."
Secret. Mystery. Marvel. Most adults can't remember exactly the first time we experienced snowfall or rain, or the first time we saw something we couldn't explain and stood in puzzled silence before a caterpillar, a dead bird, a boat in the gutter, a train, or a roller coaster. What were these things? What were they made out of? How much trouble might you get in for touching one? Long ago we made and ate mud pies, ran through sprinklers on the lawn, stood in awe and wonder before a firework show or a sunset. But how many of us do that today?
I remember the first time I got a pair of contacts. I was in Jr. High and was used to things being blurry. I got used to not seeing the board. Got used to trees being green blobs and waiting for a friend to get close enough for their expressions to go from fuzzy to clear. When I walked out of the optometrists with my new eyes, I was in shock. I could see colors again! Grass! Birds! Loose gravel in the road! Road signs! People's faces came into focus from across a crowded hall, I was able to get a driver's license, and I would literally stop and stare at trees--pine trees, oak trees, shrubs or aspens--for long moments, making everyone around me think I was mad I'm sure. (There goes the girl who stares at trees!)
Over time of course, this sense of seeing everything for the first time again faded. It took only a matter of days before I began taking for granted that my vision was improved and these things could be seen once more. I had lost my ability to WONDER.
"The only thing we require to be good philosophers it the faculty of wonder," Jostein Gaarder wrote in his philosophical novel Sophie's World. Sophie is a young girl who keeps getting the most mysterious letters from an unknown philosopher that is insistent that she not grow to adulthood dull to the sense of wonder. "For various reasons most people get so caught up in everyday affairs that their astonishment at the world gets pushed into the background...to children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course."
The picture I have posted here is one I took while in Peru on a humanitarian trip. The children gather around Gary, one of the amazing men in our group, to stare in wonder at the camera he has and the images it has captured. I realized as I took this picture that many of us had forgotten to wonder about cameras. We knew that they worked. We knew what they did. And we stopped wondering about the HOW or the WHY. For the kids in Urubamba who didn't see cameras regularly or ever operate one before, these were important questions.
How sad, Gaarder writes, that we as a species grow so numb to our surroundings. We would rather discuss the price of tomatoes, or some gossip about celebrities than spend any amount of time dwelling on the grotesque, the shocking, the difficult things that are daily a part of the lives of others. We get used to things being blurry. War? What's that? Well, we're in one aren't we? Been part of one for over ten years now, and yet it seems to have no holding in our day to day concerns. Politics, hunger, genocide, corruption...these things seem too big or too abstract for much of the world, and particularly Americans, to really gain an understanding and an empathy for.
That's not to say we don't have worries, because of course, we do. We worry about our eduction. About work and rent and social status. We worry about being liked and we worry about being disliked. We sweat all of the small stuff, in great degree, and somehow forget that we aren't the only ones here. Usually it takes something big to snap out of our own worlds and SEE. There is some scary stuff out there. There are people who hate us enough to attack us. There are people so hungry they readily steal, kill, and ravage their neighbors for food. How much time do we spend wondering about our place in all that? Wondering if we're just too small to make a ripple in that big wet mess? Wondering if there's something we can do?
Recently I went out searching for more families for the Food Bank program here at the college. I visited with the ones from last year and was shaken by what I saw. The majority of them had lost jobs over the summer. Some were facing eviction. Some were working full time with too many children to care for. All were in debt, either
monetarily and emotionally. I had wondered how they were doing during the break, but not enough. Now I have too many things to wonder about them. These are families I have come to love and know well, and I wonder where they'll be in a year. In two? In ten? I wonder what my part is in all this. I wonder if anything I can do will ever help enough.
This kind of wondering makes you want to fight back. Makes you want to do something. There are many other kinds of wondering, but this is the primary one I wish we as a society would never lose. Unfortunately I know that even as this incident stays in my thoughts this week or this month, eventually it will fade and be replaced by more current trials. Eventually, I'll stop wondering.
I wish I could say there was an easy way for human beings to halt the progress of our societal amnesia. Wish we could just decide to stop forgetting and taking our lives for granted. Would it make us hyper sensitive to death and birth and little miracles? Or would it make us simply more aware and altruistic? I wish I knew.
If you're reading this, take the time to wonder about something today, and see if it changes your day, and if even for just a moment, you can feel something new again.
