Consider people you know, how they keep going when they’re tired, breathe through pain, get up yet again to walk a crying baby, settle down in the middle of an argument and admit fault and move on. It’s amazing to me that people love me, amazing that people forgive each other, that those once at war with each other can eventually live in peace. We don’t know what love actually is, either, but it is all around us. We use words like “atoms” and “quarks” and “photons,” but no one knows what a quark or photon actually is. Fine enough, but underneath this skim of meaning laid over the boiled milk of reality, we don’t truly know what anything is. The mind categorizes and labels things to help us survive. If you’re not amazed, you’re not paying attention.Įxplore “don’t know mind”-not “duh” mind, but an openness that doesn’t immediately slot things into boxes, that allows a freshness and curiosity. Try to see more of your world in this way, as if you are seeing it for the first time, perhaps through the eyes of a child if not a caveman. Glass windows, pencils, flat wood, the smell of coffee, woven cloth, a metal spoon… it would all be amazing. Crazy! Imagine being a Stone Age person transported 50,000 years forward into your chair. This morning I sat down to my computer, clicked a mouse, and chanting recorded in a Russian cathedral filled the room. Seen with the eyes of a child, the simplest thing is amazing: a blade of grass, being licked by a puppy, the taste of cinnamon, riding piggyback on your daddy, or the fact that running your eyes over lines of black squiggles fills your mind with tales of dragons and heroes and fairy godmothers. I think back to that look in the eyes of our son and daughter as they were born, blinking in the light of the room, surprised by all the shapes and colors, entering a whole new world. Opportunities for amazement are all around us. Perhaps most deeply, being amazed brings you into the truth of things, into relationship with the inherent mysteries and overwhelming gifts of existence, scaled from the molecular machinery of life to the love and forgiveness in human hearts to the dark matter that glues the universe together. It also opens the heart: I couldn’t any longer be even a little exasperated with my wife. In a word, I was amazed-which means “filled with wonder and surprise,” even “overwhelmed with wonder.”īesides the simple happiness in this experience, it lifted me above the tangled pressures and worries I was stuck to like a bug on flypaper. From the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being.