I guess there are at least two ways you could take the phrase “normalizing wonder”. One is to see that as meaning to make wonder bland, ordinary (like stripping wonder of its wondrousness), and another would be something like including wonder in everyday experience. I don’t believe I am alone in wanting to include wonder in everyday experience. That’s generally where I’m headed with this essay, but I’ll first “flashback” to set up how I’ve come to the understanding I have.
Since my birthday falls in the middle of the schoolyear, my parents had me tested before entering kindergarten to see whether it was best to start me a little early or a little late. Although the test results showed that I had the intellectual ability to begin learning how to tie my shoes, my parents decided to hold me out for that half-year anyway, quetioning whether I was too “silly” to do well in school. Perhaps only Miss Keck, my eventual kindergarten teacher, could speak to whether the wait was a success.
Why do I start with pre-kindergarten stories? Well, I remember what I felt like before starting school, I remember the excitement I had that first day walking to Whitfield Elementary School with my mom, I remember being uncertain about this new lady that would be responsible for teaching me how to play dodgeball (among other, seemingly less important things, like writing). I remember bringing excitement to school with me.
Since the first day of kindergarten and dodgeball, I’ve had to face a set of questions that I was certainly too “silly” to expect as a precocious five-year-old. If life seems so inherently exciting, why do people struggle so much? I think that I have been most confused, not by other people at times not being excited, but by other people trying to squash my own or others’ excitement, as if excitement is sometimes inappropriate. Under this generally unhappy societal pressure to justify one’s happiness or excitement, we learn a few different responses. We can try to fight off the need to justify happiness, like denying that other people have the right to expect us to be “appropriate”. We can learn to squash the signs of our excitement and feel resentful. We can develop what psychologists call “learned helplessness” in response to this social pressure. We can learn to fuzz out or act distracted, as if we aren’t capable of hearing the message. Or, we can look to insulate ourselves within one type or another of protective social group.
We can notice this social pressure form the inside when we feel nervous about someone else’s expression of excitement, usually when we feel threatened or irritated, and look on disapprovingly and maybe even say something to them about it. While I don’t want to get into how to teach “delayed gratification” here–although I’ll recognize that it’s an important issue–I do want to get into what to do about all the negative personal effects of all those responses to feeling the pressure to justify or dull our happiness. While any of those response I listed may be “appropriate” or natural enough, I don’t find any of them to be satisfying. I have already spent enough of my life fighting off the need to justify excitement and feeling resentful. While I am not tired of fighting, I do think there is a better way (and, no, resignation isn’t it).
A sense of dislocation can only occur when one’s inherent curiosity is discouraged or when one does not feel engaged with people and world. The rest of the story is about how curiosity and engagement play out in one’s lifetime.
Maybe, for some, that a contentious statement or maybe it’s obvious. The personal question is of how to respond to the habits we’ve learned about discouragement and disengagement. The social question is of how to educate kids, but I’ll leave that for another time; I don’t believe we can really figure out that answer without addressing habitual discouragement and disengagement. Think about learning and communications; kids and other adults learn more by observation and emotional influences than by studying “content” alone. To say it another way, we learn more based on what people do than based on what is said. This is why it’s important to recognize the emotional and cognitive habits of discouragement and disengagement, because if I don’t change what I do and feel, I’ll continue to communicate discouragement and disengagement even if I don’t intend to.
Psychologists in the last couple of decades have done a nice job on figuring out how anxiety works and how to overcome anxiety. Anxiety and traumatization are central roadblocks to feeling curious and engaged, so, once those problems are part of our lives, we need to figure out how to address them. Social anxiety and all the emotions around social connections work out a little differently than the type of traumatization that comes from being startled and overwhelmed, and even though we’ve figured out how to address anxiety well, we cannot yet say the same about traumatization. To the extent that social pressures are chronic or long-term, it can be harder to see the results in ourselves, and it can be harder to understand how the results connect to the initial causes. This paragraph is basically a caveat, like bringing up “delayed gratification”, but it may be an important caveat.
So while I do not want to avoid anxiety and traumatization as related topics, I do want to focus on curiosity and engagement. Because wonder is a natural part of life, we never have to try to feel wonder. Trying to feel wonder is about as mistaken as trying to be happy. Just as happiness is a by-product of other action, wonder is a by-product of the vitality we feel as part of life. So just as trying to feel happy will eventuate in one feeling stretched and probably ingenuine, trying to feel wonder will leave one sort of stretched and probably kind of spastic in trying to grasp sporadic moments of wonder. That trying will teach one to distrust oneself, to doubt that wonder is a natural part of being alive.
While it is important, then, to find the willingness to address one’s significant anxieties and any significant traumatization in a corrective manner, that diagnosis and correction by themselves will not develop a consistent awareness of wonder in one’s life. We have all been sent many messages of discouragement and disengagement. Trying too hard is not a sufficient, long-term solution, so bravado or machismo is out. The only thing that is necessary to feel wonder is to feel curious and engaged. If you want to see these as two things, fine. I don’t, but the words don’t matter to me.
Besides doing a nice job on anxiety, psychologists have done a poor job on mindfulness. That’s understandable, mindfulness is relatively new to our culture (in one sense). But while it’s understandable, it is not necessary to continue. The result of seeing mindfulness as a corrective measure means that we will always understand it or remember it as connected to difficulty or suffering. That’s a piss-poor way of diminishing mindfulness. Mindfulness is the doorway into consistent wonder. When it is phrased within renunciate spiritualist doctrine, it may be directed away from curiosity and engagement; when it is phrased as a corrective measure to depression or whatever else, it is understood as being directed away from some sort of suffering. But those understandings are about avoidance, not mindfulness. Mindfulness cannot be “directed away”–it is by nature and definition about directing attention “to” or “with”.
While it can feed into what can be seen as disengagement or nonattchment, seeing nonattachment as disengagement is another mistake, often based in aversion and habituation and confusion. Because spiritualist doctrine has often focused on some sort of formlessness or renunciation, this is as understandable as the field of psychology misrepresenting mindfulness. But being understandable does not mean it is helpful or necessary.
Within secluded subcultures like monasteries or convents, it is perfectly acceptable for folks to be very focused on nonattachment. But nonattachment works out a little differently when you are working a normal job or raising kids. For various cultural reasons, then, we’ve had a somewhat limited or skewed view of mindfulness, but historically, there has never been a time when mindfulness was not recognized as being connected to wonder and delight.
The basic reason mindfulness has been mistranslated and misunderstood is that we have not grasped how mindfulness is the doorway to inspiration and that inspiration is prior to the development of further spiritual awareness. How does it all fit together? Well, in social groups that are somewhat secluded from normal social pressures and expectations, it makes sense to get into more subtle pursuits. For those of us who need to be able to deal well and consistently with those pressures, we tend to look more for inspiration that nonconceptual, formless awareness or full-time immersion in divinity. In other words, it is hard to drive yourself to work on time when you are absorbed in some deep meditative state lasting hours or days.
But it is quite possible to bring excitement to school or bring inspiration to work. A more intense sort of inspiration becomes more likely when we cultivate wonder, curiosity, and engagement. We can do so by being mindful, by understanding that mindfulness is the doorway to wonder. Mindfulness and wonder are inherent in our lives, but most of us have learned to focus on all sorts of other things. That’s okay. Because these are inherent, they are never unavailable to us. It’s just that, once we habituate away from wonder through discouragement and disengagement, in order to bring them back in fully, it takes intention.
By bringing intentional mindfulness into every day, we invite wonder every day. Rather than waiting for opportunity to knock on my door and believing that opportunity only knocks once, instead of waiting, I open.
Copyright Todd Mertz