A Life Filled with Wonder
The five tenets of transformative wonder
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live the “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.
This month we’re exploring the theme of the sublime.
“We can say of wonder that its particular utility is to enable us to learn and retain in our memory things of which we were formerly unaware.... And so we see that those without any natural inclination to this passion are ordinarily very ignorant.”
Rene Descartes
In her book The Power of Wonder, Monica C. Parker outlines 5 elements that make up wonder.
Watch (openness)
Wander (curiosity)
Whittle (absorption)
Wow (awe)
Whoa (also awe)
When we’re open, we allow ourselves the freedom and grace to explore and let our curiosity run wild. When we are free to do this, we get to collect experiences and information we’d never have had otherwise. Our lives are forever changed by this as we absorb what we’ve gathered and in the process, are filled with awe from our discoveries, experiencing life as a changed individual.
Each of these qualities of wonder help to better enrich our lives and experiences.
Keeping Your Mind Open
Humans have a unique dichotomy in which we wish to know and have knowledge, and yet we at times can easily fool ourselves into thinking we know enough.
We desire to know. It’s foundational to our experience. But it will also hinder us if we allow it.
Keeping an open mind means we must look at experiences from different perspectives, we must believe there is “something worth seeing” in our observations.
“As humans, when we are open to experiencing new things, our brain naturally wants that openness to blossom into exploration. Why? To know.”
Letting Your Curiosities Run Free
When we’re open to new experiences and perspectives, our curiosity muscles immediately begin to get excited. Curiosity is a light in the dark, helping speak to our inner selves and guide us to what excites us.
Parker outlines two types of curiosity, surface and deep. Surface is when we’re looking for quick answers to questions—“a need for filling in specific knowledge gaps or queries.”
But it’s deep curiosity, the one where we want to know—must know—the answers to things that really helps drive wonder. This type of curiosity is what drives people to explore, to dive deeper into subjects, to continually try and find answers to large problems that aren’t easily solved.
It is in this pursuit of novelty that drives this deep desire to know and further find answers.
And it’s backed by science. As Parker writes, research from Shigehiro Oishi at the University of Virginia demonstrates that “the good life” is achieved partly through continuous exploration and “perspective-shifting” experiences.
Digesting Your Curiosities
With so much curiosity and richness, we must do something with this information. And it is through the absorption of it that we begin to truly experience wonder.
Curiosity may drive the questions, but it is absorption that helps transcend us to greater heights of knowledge and application.
When we absorb our curiosities, we digest them, learning what is important and practical and what isn’t from what we gathered.
“In this absorbed state, the object of our attention becomes hyper-real, deserving of our total emotional and attentional energy…”
It is through this attention that we convert curiosities into true knowledge.
Experiencing Awe
When in the absorption state, we have primed ourselves for the experience of discovering something new and novel. As such, we open ourselves up to experiencing the emotion of awe, that moment where we find ourselves completely captivated, breathless even, at what we’ve discovered.
Awe often acts as a grounding to reality by cementing us in the presence of something greater than ourselves.
It is in these moments that we are wowed by the experience and see there is more than our direct perception.
Awe’s Perspective Shifting
In order to really comprehend the wow that we get from experiencing awe, we have to try to understand what we’ve gone through. This is what Parker calls “accommodation.”
“Vastness is the wow moment, when something so moving has grabbed us and made us feel like a small piece of a much bigger world. And accommodation is the whoa moment, when our brain tries to make sense of that wow experience, and our view of the world is different because of it.”
We have to process the awe in such a way that it transforms our existence.
This pursuit of wonder, this ability to experience life and be transformed by it, is the path to the good life. In the process of experiencing wonder, we give ourselves unique experiences that feed our soul and push us to be transformed by our adventures.
Wonder leads us to our own individual flourishing—an acceptance of ourselves while pushing to transform our experiences of life.
It is through wonder that we truly see the bigger picture of our lives and our role within our limited time here.
“Wonder is in the eye of the beholder. Catalysts for wonder exist everywhere in the world around us, whether we are moved by them or not. A wonder mindset means making wonder an attitude, not just a specific experience. It attunes us to the certain knowledge that wonder exists and prepares us to see and receive it. As we are, so we see. See wonder.”
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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