A Sense of Wonder

A night sky in Wyoming. Photograph by Eric Hines.

I never tire of the view during my walk. When I have time, I head up into the development above the apartment where I live, where the relatively wealthy of the area live in what might be called a gated community without the gate. On the upper street, you can look out across the entire valley. The view is something I cannot imagine ever getting tired of, seeing the little town where I work from above, looking out at the seemingly endless hills stretching out into the distance. I often think of how these hills, part of the Appalachian Mountains, are impossibly ancient. The mountains were pushed up before the first dinosaurs started to walk the earth, rising when there were still trilobites crawling on ancient seabeds over 480 million years ago. They were there when the first fish walked onto land, standing as life radiated out from the seas. They saw the rise and extinction of the early reptiles, dinosaurs, the enormous mammals of the Eocene, the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea. 

As they erode down, they remain as reminders of the long history of life on this planet, of a span of time that often is beyond our imagining. How often do we take something like this for granted? How often does the familiarity with something amazing cause us to lose our wonder?

It seems like the longer we live the less we regard the world we inhabit with the wonder it deserves. We've all seen children who are amazed at the most seemingly mundane things, things that we've long since taken for granted. When was the last time you stopped at the sight of a morning fog, a night sky filled with stars, a particularly interesting passing cloud? Where is the wonder with which we used to regard the world?

The light from that star above you traveled in some cases hundreds of thousands or millions of years to reach your eyes. That light started its journey to us before we were born; for some stars the light left before the first human ancestors made tools or started fires on the savannas of Africa. How can we take something so amazing for granted? Humanity has always seen the world at least in part with wonder, first creating tales of gods and heroes to help explain it, but in the past few centuries the work of science has been to pull back the veil hiding the reality of the world from us. If anything, it has revealed a world far more interesting and astounding than anything we could have imagined before. 

Our ancestors imagined the world driven by the squabbles of gods and the hubris of humanity. Science reveals a world driven by the fires at the heart of the planet, of continents smashing together and drawing apart again, of a universe driven by often simple laws that create the complexity we see around us. And the most exciting thing of all is that we've hardly begun to explore, to study and understand the world around us. We may be tempted to think that science has solved the great mysteries of the world, but that would be a faulty understanding. We've only known about evolution through natural selection for a century and a half--continued work reveals the complexity with which this operates, continues to chart the interrelatedness of all life, continues to search for its origins. We've only known for barely a century that the universe was more than just our own galaxy, that it is full of an endless number of other galaxies, each containing millions of stars and millions of planets. Our species hasn't even been exploring space for a century yet, and we ourselves have only landed on the moon. Imagine what wonders await future expeditions, future probes of our solar system and beyond!

It may not always seem to be true, but while the world is often full of sorrow, there is also beauty and wonder everywhere we look, if only we have the capability of seeing it as we march through the monotony of the day-to-day. Look for that wonder, re-discover it if you've stopped seeing it, and hold onto it. It is a light even in the darkest times.