This post is part of the online initiative Reverb10. You can find all of my Reverb10 posts here.
{via weheartit}
December 4 – Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?
I find a sense of wonder in everything around me.
I find myself amazed by nature. By the intrinsic complicatedness of the world and how well thought out it is. By how everything in the world is carefully balanced out.
I also find myself amazed by our human evolution. Just the fact that I can type words on my computer, and that you can read them, wherever in the world you are, the fact that there even is such a thing as a computer and the internet, or even more basic, that there is such a thing as language, particularly as sophisticated as modern languages are, amazes me.
We see so many things, we use so many gadgets every day without giving it a second thought. We just take it for granted that these things exist: high-rise buildings, cellphones, electricity, phones, computers, airplanes, even flushing toilets. All the tools that have made the world a smaller place and that allow us to travel even to the most remote places on this planet.
But when you really think about it, all these things are quite new inventions in terms of the age of the world. And someone had to invent them first. It honestly blows my mind sometimes, how someone came up with these things.
I cultivate a sense of wonder by stopping and wondering about all the things I take for granted, everything that has become a given in our world. Because there was a time when no one would have believed these things possible. And that is when even the most ordinary becomes extraordinary.
Love the take on this prompt! And you’re so right! I still marvel at things like phone, internet and the like myself!
I can identify with the closing comment about taking things for granted – it’s not until you’re forced to see things from another perspective that you sometimes realise what you have…
p.s. just discovered your blog this morning via a roundabout route; enjoying it enormously so far :)
What amazing too is all that’s yet to be discovered and invented and created. Thinking back to how people lived 100 years it looks totally foreign compared to the lives we live today. And really, 100 years is so insignificant, so minor in the grand scheme of history. I wonder what the world will look like in another 100 years…
When I wrote my own piece on “wonder” it didnt even occur to me to think about the awe I am sometimes struck by about where our technology has come in just my own lifetime. Thank you for the reminder to find wonder in the gadgets that we usually take for granted.