You have been bathed in wonder from the very moment that you were born. To be born at all is to be born wondering, because wondering is as simple as asking a question, and questions are the only language that babies know how to speak. They may come out babbled and bubbly, but the intent is always the same: “Who are you? What is that? Why is it there? Who am I?” As children grow up and become more sure, the questions might come slower, or quieter, or perhaps not at all, but they are always there. You will never be incapable of wondering. You only might be incapable of knowing that you are wondering. As long as you are able to reflect on your environment, be it natural or urban, you still have that power within you. You don’t even have to find it, because wonder will always find you first.
It is easy for wonder to find you in nature. A walk in the forest can uproot dozens of questions: how did the trees get here? How long have they been here? What could they say if they had mouths to speak? Life instills wonder because of its indelible simplicity; a tree is a tree, and an animal is an animal. How exactly they came to be that way is one of life’s great mysteries, which, of course, makes it a question. These questions inspired naturalists for decades, pioneering discoveries that only those with imagination could have answered. The very Earth itself is a big, dirty question mark, which I always think about when I see the steepled fingers of mountain ranges or the cupped palms of lakes and oceans. What forces had a hand in shaping such immense features? You can thumb through science books until you get a paper cut, but it’s impossible to put a finger on something so grand and slow. That feeling is wonder. Not unanswerable, but somewhat beyond total comprehension; questions layered so richly over one another that only pure wonder filters through the pores.
It feels as though concrete would block wonder from finding you. A single slab of grey that covers the entire city, a complex chemical compound of mundanity and uniformity, a material created to be underfoot. Hollow steel structures take the place of trees, and as you crane your neck back to look at these modern, man-made redwoods, you think about how people, people just like yourself, managed to build such a hulking thing. That was a question, wasn’t it? Wonder has arrived when you least expected it. Every light in every window, every window in every car driving by, every car on every road and highway and parking lot are marvels of engineering, collaboratively designed by hundreds of yous for you. Why were they made this way? Who discovered how to do this? When will the next big discovery replace everything once again? There are definitive answers to most of these questions, meaning that the wonder is temporary, but I think that is beautiful in its own way. It’s recursive wonder, driven from computer chips to microprocessors to silicon itself, where natural wonder takes the reins once again.
Wonder is not exclusively inspired by nature; to wonder is nature, human nature. Whether it is the infinite wonder of the universe or the temporary wonder of human invention, there is no shortage of questions to be asked. These questions are the backbone of progress, of understanding, of our collective human knowledge. Everything that we know, and will ever know, is because someone wondered about it. It is your right as a human being, your prerogative, to be filled with wonder, and as long as you have a question you will know that you are still alive.
Edited and Reviewed by John Ratliff II
