Wide-eyed Wonder

My father was an amateur photographer. It used to drive my mother and us kids nuts when he would pose us for the inevitable family shot, anywhere and everywhere. We waited impatiently unsmiling while he lined up his Ansco Twin-Lens Reflex 2”x 2” camera and then he would jolly us into smiling for the camera.

It wasn’t just family that he opened his lens to; he took pictures of everything. When we cleaned out my parents’ house in the late 1990s there were 37 boxes of photographs. There were pictures of every imaginable flowers growing in the wild or in centerpieces on the table. We counted over 100 pictures of Easter Lilies. There were pictures of driftwood, rocks and pebbles, scenery of all kinds, mountains, oceans streams and lakes vegetables, insects – everything.

And of course lots of pictures of family especially my sisters Carolyn, and Connie, and me and our children, the grandkids. Ray especially liked taking pictures of children capturing play and first discoveries of things. The picture above my son Zac at 2 years old is a perfect example. There it the wide-eyed wonder of first time soap bubbles.

Wide-eyed wonder, fresh perspective, what they call “beginner mind” in Zen Buddhism is a very useful mindset in the problem solving, opportunity searching of innovation, continuous improvement, or any kind of change. Wide-eyed wonder, “perpetually falling in love” is an accepting mindset. You ask “In what ways might we?” You suspend critical judgement and accept all perspectives in search of ideas.

Hanging out with kids is a great way to freshen your perspective.

When my eldest daughter, Tegan, was about 12, she answered some paternal request with a  smart remark.

“Tegan,” I said “if I had answered my father like that, I would have been picking myself up off the floor across the room.”

“Well Pop, that’s because Grampy raised you in a very strict way. Whereas I’m being raised to be a wise-ass.”

I laughed. There was no punishment. Tegan, it turns out, was right, she was being "raised to be a wise-ass".

This has become a family legacy. Phoebe, Tegan’s eldest, (4 year-old) daughter insisted on playing Go Fish with me. But we hadn’t played for a while so she asked me to read the rules. I finished with what to do with pairs of “fish” cards, how many cards to deal, and finally read “The youngest player goes first”

“That’s me!” beamed Phoebe

“How do you know?” said I.

“Because I have no wrinkles. I don’t wear glasses and that’s all I have to say about that!"

Phoebe went first.

So one way to cultivate wide-eyed wonder is to hang out with kids, “become like little children” Ask “Why?” or “Why not?” a lot.

Another is to put yourself in environments that take your breath away. Nature does this for me, breaking out of the trees when hiking, flushing a loon canoeing at dusk on Moosehead Lake in Maine, a sunset at an “end of the earth” place, watching the sun sink into the sea in Key West, Negril, or Cape Town.

(I’m sure that sunrises on eastern facing beaches are also epiphany producing, but because I don’t function so well at dawn,  I have seen a lot more sunsets than sunrises.)

Travel to an exotic country, learning a new physical skill – like self-arrest on a mountain climbing rope team, immersing yourself in a new academic field – physics for humanities grads or Shakespeare for engineers – things that take you out of your comfort zone broaden your perspective and stimulate wonder.

In a state of wonder we can compare two unlike things and learn from the antonym. Wonder can lead us to speculate on the impact of today’s actions on tomorrow, next year, next century. Wonder can lead us to "walk in another's moccasins."

Wonder is a question not a statement. “Why?” “Why not?” “How?” “Please tell me more.”

Wide-eyed Wonder seems so hard to cultivate at my advanced age. How can I get more?

I wonder. . .