A Call to Wonder in A Disorienting Time (Shot of Wonder #18)

Ideas for leading, creating, and building amid uncertainty

Dear change-maker,

On Christmas Day a few years ago, my wife and I had an open house of friends. By evening, eight of us circled around to discuss these remarkable times of radical change. Politics. Climate. Economies. I didn’t hear in my friends’ voices despair – although I did hear rage, frustration, confusion, hope. And wonder.

Though these are the best of times, these are, also, the worst of times. But one thing is certain: This is not the time of certainty.

When what we think is up is actually down, when what we thought was true is false, we feel as if we are falling down a matrix-like rabbit hole.

It’s terrifying. It’s exhilarating. It’s dizzyingly new. It is wondrous. This age is an age of wonder. For wonder is not just kids stuff.

We’re in a disorienting time. We’re in a state of wonder. No surprise.

Wonder is that subtle astonishment of the soul that both disorients and delights with new insight. Wonder itself is a quiet disruptor of our own biased ways of seeing ourselves and our world.

Curiously, during the highly disruptive centuries of the 1200s-1700s in Europe, no other emotional experience was debated upon, described, and cataloged as much as wonder was. (1) And I would argue that no other human emotion is being as pervasively experienced right now as wonder and its related faces of astonishment, surprise, bewilderment, and sublime terror.

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