How To Find Wonder in Everyday Life

What if wonder isn't something we've lost, but something that's always knocking at our door and we've simply stopped answering? In this episode, I share my personal definition of wonder and explore why the very busyness of modern life might be obscuring what's already reaching toward us.

I dig into:

• Why wonder is an encounter with frontiers, not a feeling to chase
• The "elsewhere IV drip" of constant digital distraction that pulls us from presence
• How the outrage-attention media complex fragments our ability to focus on what matters
• The wisdom of "tending to the part of the garden you can touch"
• The difference between mystery (to live in) and riddles (to solve)
• How wonder uses the raw material of our everyday busyness—if we know how to look

For anyone feeling like they're living in a chronic state of distraction, perpetually elsewhere while life passes by, this episode offers a way back to presence. Not through adding more to your schedule, but through recognizing that wonder is already woven into the fabric of your daily experience.

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"You think you are alone. As the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you'll never get to know, but whom love you. And that is an immense reward." — Jorge Luis Borges

I wanted to lead off with this quote on this new episode of Where Wonder Went.

Welcome back. This is episode three, and before we dive into the substance of what I want to discuss—which is my sort of pet definition for wonder—I wanted to spend some time investigating this podcast as a thing in itself, with the application of the eyes of wonder, so that I might tease out what is meaningful to me here.

I have no yearning for this to be some grandiose project that reaches millions and millions of people. I do not seek fame. I feel called to do this. This is something that feels acutely meaningful to me, for three reasons that jump out to me. One of them is captured in this quote.

Many of you will have found this through my newsletter, Down the Rabbit Hole, and I do not know those outside of names and little bits of details that come through emails here and there. But of the group that receives these emails, I know so little about the contents and the circumstances—the immediate alarms and difficulties and beauties that infuse the lives of these readers, of your life if you are a reader. And that lack of knowledge does not deny a sense of intimacy that I feel, or a sense of care. Obviously, it’s a limited form of care. I cannot reach in and express words of wisdom that might reach you in a way that is very particular to your circumstances. I can only hope to do that by being guided by some sort of higher, benevolent process that is beyond me.

You may call that synchronicity. You might call that coincidence. You might call that the universe. You might call that God—whatever sort of higher form that could inspire me to speak in a way that helps unlock something in your life, all the while me never knowing that I shared a key.

There is something I find beautiful about this. The internet has become a place that feels very different from when I was engaging with it as a young boy, very excited about this new technology. It was not crowded—the roads were made of dirt, so to speak—but now everything is a freeway, and there’s a lot of dizzying busyness that can be overwhelming. It’s a far cry from the humble hole-in-the-wall taverns I felt I used to come across.

My hope is that listening to this can feel like finding a weird, wholesome pocket of good vibes and earnest communication in an environment on the internet where there’s a lot of hyper-polarization and tension and disconnect. That I may meet you here, and that we go largely undiscovered, and that it is a little sort of campfire nestled in the woods on the outskirts of town—no longer frequented because the promises of the hustle and bustle of the city call most to those flashing lights. But for those of you listening, there’s something else calling you here.

And you are the folks I feel I’m meant to be speaking to. I have no growth strategy here, even though I have the capability and the skills to do marketing. Maybe someday I will be called to take that more seriously. But up until now, my focus is much more about doing my best to speak earnestly, to speak that which I feel so deeply called to share. That is why this project exists. I have felt for years that there is something important to share about this matter, and that importance, as of now, is not calling itself to be subject to some well-planned, intentional, “Okay, I’m going to automate organic social media postings such that I have ten podcast clips that people can digest and find it.”

I really like that there’s this weird hole-in-the-wall that exists right now at this juncture. Maybe through some odd openings, things grow. But that is not what I’m aiming at right now. I’m doing my best to be with the intensity of the feeling—to share the bolts of lightning that are ricocheting inside of my being that I feel would be useful to those who have already found their way here. And maybe you’ll feel called to share this with someone. But for some reason, the integrity of this—there is a sense of appreciation I have for this small group. I mean, we do have some reach; it’s not absolute crickets. But there is a real appreciation for the small gathering around the fire, so to speak, that this has mustered, and this circle of invisible friends that we can participate in—not exclusively through this podcast, but beyond that. There is a disposition that I do my best to hold and bring to the world, and you may be among those sorts if, for whatever reason, you have been drawn to listen to this.

There is a yearning in my heart, a longing, that people would wake up to the beauty around them—and we have fallen asleep to it. I want to live in such a way that my presence can enliven the brilliance, the brightness of that beauty, such that people begin to notice it. That is a high aim and something that I fail at regularly, but I feel so moved to aim at that.

So with that said, there are some other directions here. It’s not just this vast circle of friendship—this intimacy with those who have gathered here. It is also an exploration for me personally, to endeavor to express things that live in me as condensed hyper-objects of cognition and emotion, and then to create a venue where those things get unrolled into words and can be reflected on later by others, but especially by myself, so that there is more ground for me to build off of in the future.

In some ways, I’m in a conversation with my future self by giving myself a window to lay out some of these things that I may not sit down to talk about otherwise for an hour. And there is something about speaking that opens up modes of communication that are inaccessible to me when I’m writing, for whatever reason. So there is something very useful about this particular medium.

Relatedly, there’s value in this process for my son, who is a little more than nine months old. In the future, I think he might find some richness in listening back to what his dad was thinking about. Obviously, it’ll be years before this material is compelling to him, but to have that sort of archive, a place for him to wade in the waters of my mind when I’m 34 years old—and maybe when he’s 34, he will find that interesting. That possibility itself is very compelling to me, and it mobilizes me to do this as well.

So that’s a long forward to the episode, but it felt important to share, and I am so grateful to have you as a listener. I want to get into some rich territory today—at least I hope it will be fruitful. My hope is to dive into my pet definition of wonder. I have consumed a great deal of information from poets and philosophers and religious thinkers and a whole collection of people who have their opinions on the matter, and I have assembled my own that feels most right to me. My hope is that it will be useful to you.

Allow me to dive in by first sharing some definitions from other people.

David Chapman, who writes a really wonderful blog called Meaningness, defines wonder as:

“Wonder occurs in heightened agendaless attention combined with a suspension of habitual interpretation.”

Descartes called it:

“A sudden surprise of the soul, which brings it to consider with attention the objects that seem to it unusual and extraordinary.”

Sophia Slu, who wrote a wonderful book called Wonder: A Grammar, says:

“To wonder—to be dazzled by seeing, to truly remark, to be alive in the consciousness of what stands before our eyes, to see, to really see—marks in these notions wonder’s status as a mode of attentiveness, whose higher status as an ideal speaks to our yearning for a way of being or a way of living shaped by an intense aliveness to the world.”

And Helen de la Cruz, who wrote a book called Wonderstruck:

“Wonder is the emotion that arises from a glimpse at the unknown terrain which lies just beyond the fringes of our current understanding. Like awe, it prompts a need for cognitive accommodation, but it does not necessarily have the dimension of vastness.”

Helen makes a distinction between awe and wonder, and my definition has a distinction for awe baked into it, which I’ll get to here momentarily. There are many others who share their definitions of wonder, but I think that’s a sufficient start.

My definition is:

“Wonder occurs when we make contact with the frontiers of ordinary living.”

I’ve thought about this a lot, and each word has very specific intent. The word doing a lot of heavy lifting here is frontier. This word speaks to the cliff where the known falls into the unknown—that threshold. But not just known and unknown. In fact, those words are a particular category or tension that point to what is meant by frontier, but they’re not the only instantiation of it. It’s more like a facet of a diamond: you turn the diamond and you can see other facets to this sort of thing.

Other ways of thinking about it are: the cliff where the familiar falls into the foreign; that threshold where intimacy becomes mystery; where the conscious becomes unconscious. There are a lot of ways of conceiving these frontiers—where self becomes other is another one. This is, I think, an important word because it calls forward the recognition that the world we see—visible and invisible—is another distinction. When I said the word see, that stuck out to me.

“The world we see is not the whole of the world,” right? We’ve assembled these models of the world around us. We have built very useful models that give us a great degree of skillfulness in navigating the world in order to meet our aims. But these models are instrumental, not comprehensive. And occasionally, they can break down through some kind of rift that happens that causes the model to recognize that it failed to account for something gargantuan in its experience, because it had never yet encountered said gargantuan thing.

And that is more like awe, where the model—if you can imagine the vision that I have in my head—maybe it’s a good example to speak about my son, since he’s a baby and I’m witnessing vividly and up close the slow turning and the slow beginnings as he assembles his world model: he needs to learn to navigate, building the capability of crawling and standing and these things that will afford him a way of pathfinding. Higher and higher levels of that obviously begin to bloom as he builds on the scaffolding of the basic skills he’s assembling today.

The image I see is almost like a sphere that surrounds a consciousness—or view it as a body as you move through the world. There’s a sphere that surrounds you, and that sphere constitutes your model. That sphere represents what’s available for you to perceive in the things that surround you. Say that sphere is made of glass. If something happens—like a loss, or some kind of mystical experience—there are a number of ruptures that can occur where you realize, “Wow, the assembly of my world had deeply missed something in the formula of my world construction,” and that can get shattered and broken.

Obviously, that can lead people to have very difficult times and a hard time reassembling. Sometimes they try to reassemble the world as it was before the thing happened, and that’s not easy or very effective. Other times, they’re able to integrate and create a larger world model that is perhaps more pliable and more capable of absorbing the shocks that had been previously unaccounted for.

So I’m venturing a little bit into what is meant by awe. This is why you often see that awe is not purely a positive emotion; awe can very often carry with it a sense of fear. That is due to the sense of vastness associated with it. The breakdown of our world model—this disruption—creates this sense of, “Oh my gosh, I do not know how to put this in its place.” That can be, at once, enlivening because we feel ourselves existing outside the confines of the model we had—if not imprisoned ourselves in, then at least felt confined to without recognition. So there are two sides to the coin.

With wonder, it is much more often associated with positive affect—“childlike wonder,” right? There is a sparkle in your eye. That’s because wonder occurs in the occurrence of ordinary living. That’s why that word was chosen. Whereas awe—I would describe awe as contact with the frontiers in extraordinary living.

If you’re holding someone’s hand as they pass away—obviously, that is an extraordinary moment, and you may encounter a great sense of awe. Or being present for the birth of a child is another one. Witnessing incredible natural sights—whether they feel less dangerous like the Grand Canyon (so long as you stay away from the edge) or more dangerous like a great storm—these are extraordinary moments outside normal routine.

Wonder occurs inside the domain of normal, routine occurrence—ordinary living. When we experience wonder, from my framework, we are creating a higher transparency in our world model. Where it might usually be opaque, wonder increases the transparency of the sphere so we can see past what is typically available to our perception because of familiarity and the mechanisms of habituated perception. We see into the world beyond what we typically apprehend.

This is another way of saying: we make contact with the ever-present interpenetration of the mystery of being as it unfolds inside the mundane. That might sound wild. There is an appetite for this, a sense for this, that we can lean into—where we really grok more and more the peculiarity of our circumstance. It’s very easy to fall asleep to it. It’s incredibly easy to feel nihilistic and to be asleep to the beauty of the world, to feel like we’ve got it figured out and we’re know-it-alls.

Maybe grounding this so it doesn’t sound so esoteric: there is a tree that sits outside the window where I’m recording this. I can see this tree right now as I speak to you. To begin to make contact with the frontiers that are present to me in this tree, first and foremost, I switch out of a mode where I’m objectifying the tree as a “tree.” I quiet the function of my brain that feels the need to label it as such, and I let it be with me in this moment.

There is a quality to lingering and taking that time.

There’s a freshness to experience that gets walled out by what I’m calling our world model. To be clear, I am not here to be a disassembler of a world model. It is vital. We need to have these maps with which to navigate in order to be effective, capable, and safe human beings. I’m trying to create room for an increased frequency of our world models being updated by allowing ourselves, more frequently, to open to the world not as we’ve modeled it, but as it appears to us in its immediacy, in its influence, in its aliveness.

There is a beautiful quote from John O’Donohue—if you have not heard of him, I just love him. He is a special soul. He’s written many great books. I’ve listened to a number of his lectures on Audible. This quote has really stuck with me and feels appropriate for this particular riff I’m on right now. It’s related to our reverence of approach. I’m trying to approach this tree with reverence. I’m not trying to approach with an ossifying, classifying rigidity, trying to form-fit the tree into a preconceived notion. I’m letting the preconceived notion fall away, to the best of my ability, and letting the moment breathe its life into me—allowing it to speak for itself.

“When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.”

Our reverence as we approach the world matters. The face of wonder appears to us in proportion to our capacity to approach reverently. It’s hard to experience wonder if our eyes are already glazed and we’ve already decided what is in front of us.

If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to interact with someone in your life while doing your best to allow your conceptions of them to loosen. Inside our world model we have models of the people in our lives. There are things on the surface that we know about them and love—the facets of their personality, their quirks and idiosyncrasies. We possess some degree of knowledge. But beyond all that, there is still gorgeous mystery—always spontaneously engaged in a process of self-renewal. The degree to which they allow that, and aren’t trying to box themselves in, is a different discussion. But it can be challenging for people to feel like they have space to blossom into their unfolding if they’re surrounded by people who fix them in a box.

You see this a lot with family dynamics, where people feel they’re seen only as they were in their upbringing—the “younger sister,” etc.—and the update to what is new is difficult because there’s so much history that has programmed a perception that makes it hard to express what feels truly new and alive today. There’s a gravity to behave as you once were, which is a shame because it can erode intimacy.

My encouragement is to find your target, so to speak—a person you want to encounter in this way—in a similar way to how I described being with this tree, or how John O’Donohue describes reverence of approach. What beauty may be revealed through simply holding that disposition, rather than force-fitting the total assembly of your knowledge of that person to this date? Of course, that knowledge can afford you intimacy, but you cannot wall out the emergence of new beauty—the small seedling sprouting through the surface of the soil. What a beautiful gift to be one of the first witnesses of that person’s disclosure of something new on their heart—something they’re wrestling with or dancing with. If we hold openness to receive people outside the bounds of the habitual constraints our mind might reach for, you may be astounded by what falls into your lap: the beauty waiting under the surface in people’s hearts and minds.

In that approach, it is a gift both to the person being witnessed and to you, the witness. The more fully we can hold this in our relationships, the more alive they become. That is a wonderful thing.

Back to my definition—“contact with the frontiers of ordinary living.” We’ve talked about frontiers. I’ve mentioned why this is about the ordinary. I specifically chose “living” instead of “life” because I like the unfolding-ness of living. It speaks more of process rather than a static notion.

For contact: previously I leaned toward “awareness and engagement with the frontiers of ordinary living.” I went with contact because it seems to hold both. To make contact, I require awareness and engagement. There’s a tactile sensibility to the word I like. We know what it’s like to make contact—if I touch the back of someone I love. There is a tenderness and an intimacy there that felt right to me.

So that’s where I’m currently at with how I’m approaching this. I’m doing my best to investigate where these frontiers exist in my life. Obviously, people are an incredibly ripe area for that. We are such mysteries to ourselves and so rich and deep. The things you can uncover about people—beyond narrative history—what is occurring, the glimmers they perceive, what the world is teaching them at a given moment—can be astonishing.

Beyond that, the natural world we inhabit. The processes we’re engaged with. The frontier of what it means to be a father. The frontier of my knowledge of my participation in fatherhood. As I open to the deeper unfolding dynamic that has gone on over generations, I’m now the torch-bearer of it. Seeing the cascade rippling through the generations, so much of that material completely unknown to me. I know how my father related to me, but how he relates to me is downstream of how his father related to him and how he integrated that into whatever higher form he felt he could muster. And then taking that backward through time as far as you can conceive—this participation in what it means to be a father.

That unfolding in me in real time—there are things I am doing that are part of an incredibly rich story. I am participating in this greater being of a father-son dynamic in some sense. It’s a weird way to describe it, but it’s not just taking a book and passing it. There is deeper communication being transferred, a deeper in-my-bones knowing of what I am seeking to accomplish. To feel connected to that in such a mundane moment as picking him up or looking into his eyes—there’s a rippling of profound meaning that can strike us in the mundane.

This opens the door to one objection people have to experiencing wonder: “I don’t have the time.” This is all great—nice that you’ve found the time to tease these things apart and think about this—but I don’t have the time. First, I empathize with that. Young baby, busy, lots of things, juggling lots of balls. The reality of very full schedules is real.

I think we’re conditioned to have the perception of a lack of time, both technologically and culturally. Those are blended now because the primary mechanism of cultural communication is through our pocket squares that beam in information about the global unfolding—through flashing lights on a screen. We’re filled to the brim, yet trapped in a constant now, where there’s always a new emergency, a new crisis, always someone to be mad at, always something outside our immediate surroundings demanding attention or else we’re bad people.

Consider the trajectory: we once relied on local information to form our understanding of the world, supplemented by occasional news from a neighboring village. The amount of “elsewhere” entering “here” was limited. Then the printing press and increased literacy: greater access to knowledge beyond the local. Progress is wonderful, but we should be mindful of what we tread over; in seizing progress, we can inadvertently let go of things vital to the integrity of what we hope to enhance.

Then newspapers—the daily paper. Then radio—more elsewhere, longer listening. Then television—sight and sound, more sensorially demanding, though still at home. Then desktop computing. And now cell phones—an enormous leap. We carry a device that can pipe in elsewhere here, all hours of the day.

Increasingly, our presence in here has dried up, and elsewhere dominates our life. We went from maybe one percent elsewhere to, for some, ninety-nine percent. Social feeds, 24-hour news cycles, polarization. This drought of attention to our immediate surroundings is a tragedy, because it’s important to be present to the beauty that surrounds us, so that it mobilizes care—so that we become stewards of beauty, not just beneficiaries.

There’s a Jack Kornfield line: “Tend to the part of the garden you can touch.” We’re often moved away from that sensibility. We feel that to be good people we must be plugged into every atrocity unfolding on earth every day, and speak out about it to be ethical. There’s fairness to being outspoken when atrocity happens, but too often people become paralyzed in their ability to make meaningful change because they’re fixated on being outspoken about every tragedy. They post, donate a bit, move on—without depth. The constant flitting between problems hampers our ability to do anything.

There is an anger-tainment media complex where the worst things are piped into our eyeballs to generate outrage. I’m saying we have to be selective about which emotional reactions we translate into productive action. Otherwise, we live in a chronic state of outrage and become instruments—we are being used.

So I love: “Tend to the part of the garden you can touch.” There’s a local sense to that. Do you know your neighbors? Hard to do now; we have to be more willful. Beyond the strictly local, we are now hyper-local individuals with powerful technology. How can I use my gifts in this context and apply them to a problem over a sustained period of time, to make a genuine difference—not merely be a voice of outrage?

All of this is to say: it feels like our time has been drawn out of us. To the extent we’re addicted to devices—to the elsewhere IV drip where the here around us is invisible—it’s easy to feel there isn’t time to linger.

I will counter that objection: saying you don’t have time to wonder is like covering your ears when music is playing and saying you don’t have time to hear the music. Wonder is reaching into our lives already. We all have 24 hours. To experience more wonder, we can use the raw material of our busyness as opportunities to engage in contact with those frontiers, such that life feels more alive. Not just living life, but an aliveness—a freshness of appreciation. Abraham Maslow spoke about this “freshness of appreciation.” That word freshness is important.

There’s also a quote from author Natasha Muster: “I believe that there is luminosity hiding in the shadow of the mundane and things that hover at the periphery of our vision. If that’s magic, then I believe in it.” This gets at what I mean by frontier: a shift in perception where the beyond-ness, inherent to the fact that our world model is not all-inclusive, begins to knock on our door—and we open it. Or rather, it’s already knocking; are we willing to turn our doors into windows, so to speak, so we can indulge the wondrous inside a very busy life and schedule?

As I talked about in my first episode, there are forces erasing wonder from the world—from your world, from mine. But there is a thread that always connects us that cannot be severed, because the presence of wonder is here and bleeding in, and we can open from our closure. That is my position.

So that is the riff. My gesture toward what I mean when I say this podcast is “Where Wonder Went”—this loss of wonder many of us have experienced. In this episode, I’m offering a finger pointing to where it exists around you today, close at hand. There are pockets of beauty. And mystery is a good word for it. Importantly, I use “mystery” not to describe a riddle. This gets into the difference between wonder and curiosity—which I talked about with Dan Garfield in the last episode. I’m not trying to answer a question so much as, as Ilka would say, “live in the question.” Be in the openness of it. There is such ripeness beyond the mere apprehension of new knowledge—which curiosity can be. Curiosity is very useful; don’t mistake me as against it. I’m against the conflation of curiosity with wonder.

This was a good example of the second thing I started this episode with—just exploring and speaking and seeing what words come out. It was a bit of a journey for me, a ride to see where this went. I hope it was sensible to some degree. I hope you enjoyed listening.

If you have any questions, or particular streams you’d like me to swim down, I’d be happy to do that. You can go to speakpipe.com/wonder to leave me a voice note. Of course, you can reply to the email where you received this and ask questions there; I’d be happy to engage and dive deeper into what might be surfacing. This is such a rich and deep topic for me. I’ve got so much more to say, which is why this is an ongoing project. I don’t know where the bookends are—and they probably don’t exist. The more adequate question might be, “When does the well run dry in me?”

I’ve been writing the newsletter Down the Rabbit Hole for five years, and I have no intention of stopping. My sense is that this will be a more intimate and intense practice than the newsletter, but it’s a practice trying to make a similar type of music.

If you listened this long, thank you so much. I hope there was a gem or two you can take with you along your journey. I am extremely grateful for your attention, and I hope that wherever you are and whatever you are doing today, wonder has a way of reaching you.

This was Mike Slavin. This is Where Wonder Went, and I will speak to you again next time.