Have We Forgotten How to Be Amazed?

Inside Nat's Notebook - Real Reflections for Real Change

You are made of material that once existed inside stars. Just sit with that for a moment.

Actually, that’s rather the point of this blog, because chances are you’ve heard some version of that fact before. Maybe you watched a documentary about it, read it in a book or saw one of those beautiful images of a galaxy accompanied by the words “We are all stardust.”

And what did you do with this completely astonishing piece of information?

Possibly thought, Wow. Then carried on scrolling, right?

I don’t think that’s because we’ve become unimpressed with the universe. I think something else is happening.

We have access to more extraordinary information than humans at any other point in history. We can find out what a star is made of while waiting for the kettle to boil, watch footage from the surface of another planet while eating breakfast or see inside the human body before we’ve even got dressed.

We know so much. And I wonder whether somewhere in our enormous appetite for knowing, we’ve become remarkably good at knowing astonishing things without necessarily allowing ourselves to be astonished by them.

Knowing Something Isn’t The Same As Being Astonished By It

The idea that parts of you originated in stars isn’t simply a beautiful metaphor. Many of the elements that make up your body, including carbon, oxygen and iron, were created through processes involving earlier generations of stars, long before our solar system existed.

Which means the iron carrying oxygen around your body has a history considerably longer than yours.

That’s mind-blowing, right?

These elements have a history stretching back billions of years, and now here they are, part of you, while you're sitting there wondering what to have for dinner.

I love the absurdity of that. Isn't it great?

There are examples like this everywhere. When you walk outside on a sunny morning and feel the warmth on your face, it is completely normal. It happens all the time, right? Except the Sun is roughly 150 million kilometres away, and its light takes a little over eight minutes to reach us.

You probably learned something about that at school. But knowing the explanation doesn’t make what is happening any less extraordinary. That light has crossed an enormous distance through space and is now warming your face while you stand outside trying to remember if you put the washing on before leaving for work this morning.

When Did Wonder Become Something We Grew Out Of?

Children are rather good at wonder. They don’t simply want to know what something is. They want to know why. Then why again. And often there is another why waiting after that.

Why is the sky blue? Why can birds fly? Why do stars come out at night?

Eventually the adult answering these questions becomes exhausted and says something deeply educational like, “Because it just does.”

But underneath all those questions is something beautiful. The world hasn’t become obvious yet. A puddle can still be fascinating. A shell deserves close inspection. And the Moon appearing in the daytime demands an immediate explanation because WHAT IS IT DOING THERE?

Children don’t know more about the world than we do. They know considerably less. But they haven’t yet accumulated quite so many explanations for everything around them. As adults, we have. We learn that the Sun is a star. We learn how plants grow. We learn why the Moon sometimes appears during the day. And that knowledge is extraordinary too. But I wonder whether sometimes “I know” becomes the point where we stop looking.

Knowing More Should Give Us More To Wonder About

There is something wonderful about discovering that an ordinary thing you’ve barely noticed has an entire story happening underneath it. Knowing how something works doesn’t have to remove the wonder. Sometimes it makes the ordinary even more extraordinary.

The Sun being 150 million kilometres away doesn’t make its warmth on your face less remarkable because you understand the science. Knowing where the iron in your body came from doesn’t make it less astonishing that billions of years of cosmic history are somehow involved in you being here.

Maybe knowing doesn’t have to be the end of our curiosity. Maybe it can be the beginning of it.

Do You Actually Let Extraordinary Things Astonish You?

Maybe wonder isn’t something we lose as we grow up. Maybe it gets buried underneath familiarity, explanation and the simple fact that life has other things requiring our attention. You can’t spend your entire day standing in the garden staring at sunlight. At some point somebody has to make dinner, right?

But perhaps there is room for a few moments when something familiar becomes extraordinary again simply because you properly notice what it is.

#Rebel Moment

The next time something makes you think, Wow, that’s incredible, don’t let wow be the end of it. Stay with it for a little longer. Look again. Let yourself be curious about something you thought you already knew.

See what happens when you give wonder a little more room.

Stay Blessed!

LoveLove

Nat x

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