Wonder

 Wonderful” starts with wonder.  Can anything be truly wonderful if we do not feel the well of amazement when experiencing it?  

The most deeply religious men and women of history were consumed by “radical amazement.”  They peered at the world through lenses that saw the miraculous in the mundane.  This is the primary difference between the religious and the non-religious.

A colleague tells the story of a child looking up to her father, pointing to the heavens and asking, “Daddy what is up? Beyond the sky?”

“Ether, my child.”

At this the little one crinkled her nose and turned her attention to other things.

The task of an educator (and who is not an educator to a child?) is to enlarge her horizons, not to limit inquisitiveness or crush curiosity.

Make no mistake: Wonder is not the sole purview of children or tzaddikim.  It abides in each of us and must be allowed to swim in the endless ocean of life.  Stand by the shore of the sea or smell a fragrance, the rabbis tell us, and say a blessing.  Why?  Such an utterance allows us to give way to jaw-dropping inspiration.

Albert Einstein wrote that, “The supreme task [of scientists] is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction.  There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them…”

Sit back, gaze at the stars and feel awestruck.  You have not forgotten how to do that, have you?  No, it is like riding a bicycle.  Once you know, you always know.  What draws us away from feeling amazement are the pulls on our time that want to make us believe that they have something more important to tell us.  There is nothing more meaningful than being still, saying a single prayer with kavanah (meaning), hugging love and hanging on to them feeling your emotions overflow, tasting your food, not questioning helping another or being thankful for your eyesight.  That is why the ancient ones tells us that we must utter one hundred blessings each day.  In being aware of the multitude of miracles that surround us we become elevated.  And happier.  Much happier.

The Pathless Path

There is no answer.

There never has been a n answer.

There never will be an answer.

That’s the answer.  

~Gertrude Stein

 

Isn’t that wonderful?