3 ways to find and invite more wonder

“We often attribute wonder as being positive across the board,” the poet and writer Maya C. Popa tells me. “And it has a semantic closeness to awe or surprise. But what makes it distinctive is that it makes us ask questions. [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge said poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder. There is this idea of being big with wonder.”

When Coleridge and Popa talk about “being made big,” they do not necessarily mean big in ourselves. This is not about puffing up the self, but about joining with something big.

There’s an odd paradox regarding human happiness, where people often remember themselves as happy, but rarely feel themselves as being happy. Happiness is in hindsight. It’s conjured or constructed in reflection. A big part of this is that happiness often involves a kind of egolessness. It’s when you forget who you are. And so, the paradox is that if I am to be happy, I have to lose any sense of the “I.”

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Popa about one of the oldest and most common forms of egolessness there is: wonder. Wonder is a library with many books. There’s religious wonder, aesthetic wonder, scientific wonder, and the wonder born from love. But according to Popa, they are all joined by one thing: Wound is the Origin of Wonder.

The wound

“The word wonder comes from the cognate ‘Wunder,’ or wound from the old German,” Popa tells me. “So I thought that’s so interesting. Wonder is what wounds us, enters us. And that’s what a wound is: It’s a breaching of a layer.”

Of course, the language of “wound” and “breaching” is not “positive across the board.” A wound is damage, and a breach is vulnerability. But that imagery is important because what is being wounded is not your body but something far deeper. It is the thing that we wear. It’s the mask we present to the world, and the part of ourselves that insists on dividing, cutting, and compartmentalizing the world.

I recently spoke with the great Iain McGilchrist (out next week), who calls this part of ourselves “left brain thinking.” The Daoists call it Yin, the psychoanalysts call it ego, and Friedrich Nietzsche called it the “Apollonian.” It’s the rational, calculating, busy, busy, busy part of yourself. And wonder is what wounds it. This is how Popa describes it:

“When you close your eyes and sit still, you feel a tremendous resistance, almost like a reckless thrashing against the net of the self. [Wonder] requires dissolution. It’s not just about construction. It’s about dissolution. It’s kind of a destructive force. And I think this is a deepening into life.”

Getting the house ready for wonder

Wonder is not the same as happiness, and it’s not the same as flourishing, but it’s often on the road to both. It is what breathes in the world and opens up the part of ourselves that is often and long ignored. The beautiful mystery of the Universe is “being big” in exactly the same way that our attempts to understand the world and control things make us feel small. Wonder is at the end of letting go.

In some ways, a “three tips to enjoy more wonder” is a fool’s errand. It’s the left brain trying to commandeer the right. It’s Yang pretending to be Yang. But Popa and I discussed a series of things we can all do to nurture the right conditions or mindsets to invite more wonder. This is how we can wound that part of ourselves that needs wounding — to set ourselves as vulnerable to the world.

First, stop fleeing the present. You will not find wonder tomorrow or yesterday. You will not become bigger by obsessing about the past or worrying about the future. To appreciate wonder, we have to recognize that this moment is all you have. The tide will wash the sand away, and the birds will swoop out of sight. You cannot take a photo or capture this moment for later. Wonder only arrives in the now. As Popa put it, “The reality is there is nothing but the present. There’s always only been an ongoing now. You could walk by a zillion wondrous things a day and be asleep to them because you’re focused on your to-do list.”

Second, wrench your attention back. We are masters at selective attention. The ability to choose what to see and what to ignore is an important heuristic that we all need to get by — we have neither the neurological capacity nor practical need to be aware of everything all of the time. The bad news is that we often miss a lot of the good stuff. We’re looking the wrong way. But the good news is that we can choose to attend to things differently. Look out the window, look in the mirror, look at those shadowy, swirling forms inside yourself you rarely want to see.

“It is entirely psychic, emotional, spiritual,” Popa says. “But then it has a physical component, which means you sit your butt down and you do the work and you resist your desire to look away.”

Third, wait for a guest. Wonder is something passive – it’s the welcoming of the outside in. You are wounded by something or someone. And so, to invite wonder, we need to park that part of ourselves that seeks action. In part, this is not fleeing the present – when we have somewhere to be or something to do, we do it quickly, efficiently, and with agency. We need to stop doing whatever that is.

Wonder is like a guest you haven’t planned for. You stay home, you do nothing, you wait. Life is slow. You have nothing to do. Of course, we call this boredom. We call this being “boring.” But this is where wonder is found. It knocks at your door only if you’re waiting for it.