Or, in other words, to make him journey back to the source.
*
I had run out of wonder. I knew, intellectually, that wonder was good for me, but how long had it been since the last time I felt amazed, in my guts, in my flesh? I had stopped asking the sort of questions that made me wonder (how will Father Christmas’s sledge reach southern Italy without snow?), because I had too many questions to answer about the mundane matters of life (will my car hang on for another six months?).
It had happened gradually, without my noticing it. You start fretting about tax returns and after a while you don’t have a lot of time left to worry about monsters in the dark: HMRC bureaucrats are scary enough. When I was a child, I used to spend hours sitting on the beach, gazing out to sea. I imagined myself living the life of a pirate, sailing in a ship with Long John Silver and his parrot, making landfall on islands remote and strange. But now I know that I was simply looking at a stretch of the Mediterranean, and that what I saw in the distance was not the jagged masts of the Hispaniola, but the coast of Calabria. With every new thing I learned, another speck of fairy dust was wiped from the surface of my existence, until I was ready, finally, to function in a wholly adult world, and my life was a more or less spotless house. Orderly, cleaned twice a week, no dust at all. Tidy, safe and mind-numbingly boring. Ye gods!
I wanted my wonder back.
*
You have a vague feeling of what I mean by wonder, but you might want a better definition. Let me answer with another question…
…Where are you?
Let’s say you are sitting somewhere. Or standing in an overcrowded train.
All right, but in a wider sense – where are you, now? In a town, or city, or, if you are lucky, somewhere deep in the countryside, reading these words in the shade of a tree. In your imagination, take a step away – and rise. You are looking at the scene from above. Let your eyes get used to this new perspective. You can see a chunk of the planet, defined by geographical boundaries – mountains and rivers and sea. But there are no boundaries if you keep stepping away, because now you are looking at the entire planet from above, and it is a miraculous sphere coloured in blue, white and green – small, fragile and beautiful. And arguing over European Union regulations regarding the curvature of bananas seems completely pointless.
But hang on – did I just say above?
My mistake. There is no above where you are now, because out here, in empty space, there is no up and down. You are just here, floating, lost, pleasantly shipwrecked.
You haven’t stepped away far enough.
Keep stepping away. And look at the solar system: eight tiny marbles circling a bigger one, and all of them moving… you were almost tempted to say ‘forward’, but there is no ‘forward’, only space, and a game of marbles.
Step even further away. Look at the other solar systems surrounding the first one, all dancing and partying to a music you can’t hear (or can you?). Now step away some more, and look at the Milky Way, just one galaxy among many. The further you step away, the more you can see. Galaxies and nebulae and star clusters and planetary systems without number. And then what?
Stay there a few moments.
Stay there.
*
And now dive back in. Jump back to the here and now, to your body, come back to a place where ‘here’ and ‘now’ have a meaning, this human-made town, this small spot of wilderness.
Think about this: all that you have just seen is, in terms of our basic scientific understanding, perfectly real. In a very practical sense, you are twirling in a cosmic dance. Planet Earth is a spaceship, but it is big enough for you to forget what it does. Right now, Spaceship Earth is carrying you through space and time in a vast, vast universe that you know very little about. You think you stand on solid ground? Think again. To say that you are at this moment floating off into space is every bit as true as saying that you have your buttocks on a chair.
That is wonder. Wonder is the emotion you feel when your jaw drops: when you hear music so heart-stopping that it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck; when an unexpected brainwave makes your head spin; when someone you have always fancied stands stark naked in front of you. Wonder is more than surprise, though of course it contains an element of surprise. Wonder can make you happy, but it can also be terrifying. Wonder shatters what you think about the world. Wonder inspires both the best decisions and the worst mistakes you make in life.
That was what I’d lost.
*
In The World as I See It, Albert Einstein went even further than Plato in defending wonder. He said that ‘the mysterious’ is not only ‘the most beautiful experience we can have’, but also ‘the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science’. He then adds, rather ominously: ‘Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.’ So not only does wonder act as an inspiration for your best endeavours, but also the loss of it kills you, in a way. You survive, but you don’t really live. It’s that Star Trek quotation again.
And yet our society, our schools, our workplaces, go to great lengths to teach us that the opposite is true. They tell us it is important to ‘grow up’ – that’s what you have to do if you want to ‘get on in life’. Growing up means focusing on practical matters; on getting things done; on being a hard-working professional doing a busy job. It means being sensible; it means losing our sense of wonder.
Whoever taught you that, I bet he wasn’t as clever as Albert Einstein.
Einstein’s words tell us that the loss of wonder is not an unavoidable feature of growing up, but a bug – a temporary malfunction. It happens, sure; that doesn’t mean it’s good. Of course we need to develop the skills and behaviours that allow us to take our place as responsible, well-adjusted citizens of the adult world. But we don’t have to throw out our sense of wonder with our childhood toys. Even an accountant can temper the rigours of the balance sheet with nights spent debating the meaning of life.
There is a widespread notion that the older we get, the less creative we become. This is probably true for most of us; but it is not our inevitable fate. Loss of creativity doesn’t happen because of some unstoppable mechanism of ageing, it happens because our sense of wonder fades. We are not as enthusiastic as we once were. We become wearier, less daring, and thus less able to imagine and to create new stuff. And this makes us more prone to anxiety, because our eyes are dimmed, and we can’t see the myriad paths to a better life that are well within our reach, if only we had eyes to see them.
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, quoted the words of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that ‘those who have a why to live can bear with almost any how’. Frankl had survived several months’ incarceration in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War, so he knew what he was talking about. But before finding your why, you first need to wonder about it. Lose your sense of wonder, and you’ll end up wasting time fretting over your career prospects, your social status and the size of your bank account, or even sending angry tweets about little fighting cocks of men; reclaim it, and you will enrich immeasurably your experience of the world; you will find the strength and courage to change yourself, and – who knows? – even to change the world. Einstein did. That may be because he was cleverer than most people, including you. Or perhaps he just wondered more.