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How to Experience Wonder as a Grown-up
As you get older, you might have to work a bit harder to find wonder — but it’s worth the effort
Hey C (age 4¾),
When you find yourself completely overwhelmed by something exciting, surprising, colorful, delicious, tuneful, beautiful, funny, inexplicable, shocking, huge, or joyful, your eyes grow big, your mouth drops open and the rest of the world kind of disappears for a moment. You have no choice but to stand right where you are and just take it all in.
Right now, your life is full of moments like these, when the world is so extraordinary that we struggle to wrap our heads around the bigness of it all — it’s something we might call “wonder.”
I think it’s a big part of our responsibility as parents to help you encounter as many wonderful moments as you can, and we’re encouraging you to discover what you love by trying new things, exploring interesting places, playing new games, meeting new people, watching new films, eating new food and listening to new music.
Wonder is about experiencing more of the world, exploring it, and using it to stretch and expand our brains (remember that understanding the world is a key part of growing up? So finding moments of wonder are a really good way to keep growing up).
When it comes to wonder, I have two bits of not-great news, and one bit of much better news for you.
Not-great news #1
The first bit of bad news is that it’s easier to feel wonder when we experience something for the first time. The first time you ever visit a waterpark or an IMAX cinema or a foreign country or a fast food restaurant — those experiences are hard to beat, because a big part of what makes things wonderful is that we find them mysterious and surprising, and your brain just knows what to expect the second time. So it’s going to get harder to find moments of wonder as you get older, and you will have to go looking for them, because they won’t happen to you by accident as often as they do now, and it will get harder to find things that are “new,” at least on the face of it.
