THRIVING IN UNCERTAINTY: WHY WE NEED WONDER

The healing magic of wonder, awe, delight, and playfulness

- BY MAGGY WHITEHOUSE

There's an old Irish joke in which someone asks an elderly man for directions. The man replies, “I wouldn't start from here.”

If we don’t start out from the right place, then we don’t have anywhere good to go home to when the dark times come, and that is an increasing problem in our modern, secular, pseudo-religious world.

All the great mystics—whether religious or spiritual—know that we have to start with wonder, with awe, with delight, and with beauty, or we have nowhere safe to return. It's in the teachings of Thích Nất Hạnh, Stuart Wilde, and Louise Hay just as it is in the words and art of mystics like Hildegard of Bingen and Mechthild of Magdeburg. It’s at the very start of the Bible too. The translation, “And God saw that it was very good,” is a pretty measly version of the Hebrew words me'od towb, which are much more accurately translated as “exceedingly, abundantly, richly, greatly, merrily, bountifully wonderful.”

The great mystic Rabbi Heschel wrote, “The idea with which Judaism starts is not the realness of evil or the sinfulness of man, but rather the wonder of creation.” Doesn't that sound like a better way to live?

A COMMON START

We do all start with awe and wonder. As babies, everything is new and amazing. We don’t know or care what things are for, who made them, what they are called, or how they are categorized. More than anything, we want to touch them, play with them, or taste them—to experience them viscerally. If we don't like them, we'll make that quite clear, and if we do, we will fuss if this new joy is taken away from us.