The re-discovery of wonder

A child stops dead in her tracks, transfixed by a beetle crossing the sidewalk. She crouches, follows its laborious journey across concrete continents, invents stories about its destination. Her mother tugs her hand—there are errands, schedules, the tyranny of adult efficiency. The beetle becomes invisible.

This scene plays out millions of times daily, a quiet tragedy of human development. We call it growing up, but perhaps we should call it growing away—from the luminous world that once held us spellbound at every turn.

The Great Forgetting
Wonder is our birthright, yet we surrender it with startling consistency. One day a child marvels at how water swirls down a drain; years later, that same person rushes past fountains without seeing them. The miracle of flight becomes delayed departure times.

Something profound is lost when wonder dies—a particular way of being present to reality that recognizes the extraordinary hiding within the ordinary. The mystics called it sacramental vision: the capacity to see the burning bush in every bush, if only we have eyes to see.
But our culture militates against such seeing. We reward efficiency over contemplation, productivity over presence. Wonder becomes luxurious, impractical—a relic of pre-industrial consciousness.

The Wisdom of Limitations
Middle age represents wonder's deepest winter. Responsibilities multiply like weeds. The mortgage, aging parents, the troubled teenager, the demanding career—these forge chains of urgent necessity that bind us to the immediate and practical. The peripheral magic of existence fades to gray.

Yet this limitation serves a purpose. Perhaps wonder must withdraw so that other capacities can emerge: competence, responsibility, the ability to maintain the structures that sustain civilization. The eclipse of wonder may be wonder's own gift to the future.

This is the cruel bargain of human maturation: we trade the immediate apprehension of mystery for the delayed gratification of meaningful work in the world.

The Great Remembering
But then something curious happens to those who live long enough. As urgencies relax their grip—as children leave home, careers wind down, mortality becomes undeniably present—a different kind of seeing often returns.

The elderly grandmother pauses at her garden gate, suddenly arrested by morning light catching spider silk. She has been humbled by life's insistence on mystery. Decades of experience have taught her that the most important things—love, beauty, meaning—cannot be manufactured. They can only be received.

This return of wonder is not regression to childhood's naivety. It is wonder informed by wisdom, chastened by loss, deepened by the knowledge that time is finite. The child marvels because everything is new; the elder marvels because everything is precious.

The Circle Complete
Perhaps this arc—from wonder through forgetting to remembering—is not failure but design. The intensity of childhood wonder might be unsustainable for creatures who must also build societies and maintain civilization's delicate infrastructure.

But the return of wonder in later life suggests something profound: that beneath all our striving, our deepest satisfaction comes not from conquering mystery but from standing in proper relationship to it. The elder who rediscovers wonder has completed a circle, returning to an original way of seeing but now equipped with the knowledge that such seeing is sacred.

The tragedy is not that wonder fades—perhaps it must, for a time. The tragedy is when it never returns, when we remain trapped in tunnel vision until death forecloses all possibility of remembering what we once knew: that existence itself is the most extraordinary ordinary miracle we will ever encounter.

Wonder is not childishness but wisdom—the recognition that despite all our knowledge, we remain creatures of flesh and breath, temporary arrangements of stardust briefly awakened to consciousness in an impossibly vast cosmos. To forget this is human; to remember it again may be the deepest purpose of a life fully lived.

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## Discussion Questions

1. Is the loss of wonder in middle age truly necessary for human development, or could we structure society to better preserve this capacity throughout life?

2. What role does mortality awareness play in the elder's rediscovery of wonder—and might younger people cultivate this awareness deliberately?

3. How do we distinguish between wonder as wisdom and wonder as escapism from adult responsibilities?

4. What would change in our institutions—schools, workplaces, communities—if we prioritized the preservation and cultivation of wonder alongside efficiency and productivity?

5. Does the arc from wonder to forgetting to remembering reflect something essential about human consciousness, or is it merely a product of particular cultural and economic arrangements that could be reformed?