Sense of Wonder and Change

It was only a few moments earlier when I was cleaning my kitchen side of the daily build up of stains and crumbs that no one on Earth is immune to. If you're out there, tell me your secret! I was wiping around all the bits and bobs, moving them out of the way and doing the undersides, where the most mess typically resides. It was the same old routine, the bog standard daily action that I'd got used to many years previously. Then, it occurred to me to move the coffee machine. It's been there for a while, and I simply couldn't remember the last time I'd moved it.
I am glad I did as once I'd picked it up from the side, a job in which contained its own unforeseen requirement of effort, I discovered a good millimetre layer of grime. Astonished at how I had allowed this to build up, I realised that moving the coffee machine was not in my routine. Admittedly, cleanliness is not my strong point and the kitchen surfaces are about as far as it goes for multiple daily cleaning, however I had not envisaged this. I had been unconscious of the build up, and so in reality, I'd not been cleaning, I'd been following a routine designed for cleaning. I had not been present. As soon as I became present in my activity and knew that the coffee machine was there and it had to be moved, it became a part of the routine. Goodness knows for how long I had neglected it for, but my point is that it was my attitude towards the work which suddenly aligned me to the flaws in my thinking.

Often when we are children, our natural tendency to question and explore what we are told is extinguished. Those of us who are confident in our ability to make imaginative judgements and then act accordingly turn out are much more likely to be empowered individuals. We all like to feel secure, and having good teaching and instruction is a wonderful thing for everyone but there are times when a person will wish to test their strength, showing signs of confidence by adapting is not always a bad thing.

Unfortunately, for many of us, that inner sense of wonder is all too often stifled by society. We are sometimes made to feel bad for having our own ideas and beliefs even when we are being good wholesome people. The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson and Photography by Nick Kelsh is a great book about how the author nourished her sense of wonder while out walking in the wilderness with her young nephew. With loads of four and five star reviews, it is clearly helping others to rekindle that sensation in their lives too.

That sense of wonder, the feeling of curiosity and the speculations of imagination are what allowed me to break my program and look under the coffee machine. Granted, this example is far from important and makes no difference outside that of my kitchen but we're doing it all the time. We are given instructions and we follow them, at some point the instructions are learned and we can repeat them without referring back. Because we're human, we're prone to forgetfulness or misunderstandings and this means our procedures change, lose parts and become distorted over time. The solution to this is our ability to think for ourselves and make changes, in principle, we are able to rewrite our own instructions at will. Our sense of curiosity and questioning wonder is the basis for that ability. "What is under the coffee machine?".

But wait, it doesn't stop with us. Think back to school when we were being taught about evolution. Adaptations in life on a genetic level cause change, those changes which are successful for the organism are continued through reproduction and over time are distributed. When you consider many changes and geographical distributions over significant periods of generational time, evolution can be seen to occur through this process. It seems that on some level, nature is also just as curious as we are and just as excited to try new things. If we take nature as our muse we can see that through the evolution of something so basic as a fundamental particle, several times over, the universe can be formed. So your fundamental ideas and thoughts, your creative twist on the world around you is your nature, and with your sense of wonder and ability to bring change you can also build stars.

The author of The Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson, in a way was a pioneer in the field of nurturing children to retain their empowering sense of wonder. You can find out more about her in this well received book, also with many quality reviews. Who Was Rachel Carson?