Ooooh, aaaah, boooaaaahhhh — these are sounds that come from deep in your belly. They’re feelings of amazement spoken aloud, the raw sound of wonder. Around Christmas, we tend to associate wonder with children. They walk into the living room wide-eyed, buzzing with excitement at the presents under the tree. How did Santa manage to get all of that in there?
But wonder gets a bad rap. Children are full of it. And cynical adults say, well, kids are amazed because they simply don’t know any better. Which is completely unfair, because children love being amazed. They want to be surprised. That childlike joy is a good thing. And it would do us adults some good too.
Years ago, I wrote a column about the “wonderers” — people who wandered around Silicon Valley with their mouths hanging open, finding everything amazing. These “wonderers,” I wrote at the time, knew nothing, and precisely because of that, they let themselves be dazzled by things that were, firstly, not really new and, secondly, not important. Without saying it outright, I was marking myself as a “non-wonderer” — someone who’d already seen it all. With some distance, I see that differently now.
The older we get, the more we realise how little we actually know. And yet, we wonder less and less. When was the last time something truly amazed you, right from the gut? But if we’re aware that we know less with each passing year, shouldn’t we open ourselves up to wonder again? The word “open” matters here. You have to open yourself to wonder — not just stumble into it, but deliberately put yourself in situations where it can happen.
When we moved to Australia, wonder came easily. The leap to another continent, into a completely different life. Unfamiliar smells, a different language and different habits. I walked through the city in a state of constant amazement. Everything new, everything fascinating. I watched people queue at shops, observed cockatoos screeching in the trees, and sat speechless in a tiny restaurant in Chinatown. Everything was new and worth marvelling at. But daily life has a way of making everything ordinary. Habituation is wonder’s natural enemy. Once you stop looking and just go through the motions, you stop seeing anything at all.
Dare to wonder. For that, you need time and opportunity. You have to actively seek it out. And it’s not enough to pause somewhere briefly and say: well, that’s interesting. Wonder is personal and intimate. Sometimes pride gets in the way. Grown adults don’t do wonder, do they? After all, we’ve got our feet firmly on the ground. Surely being amazed just shows you’re easily impressed — or does it?
Maybe it takes courage and openness at first. But whoever lets wonder in enriches their own life and the lives of everyone around them. It’s the small, everyday things that inspire wonder — if you stop and really look.
Be open. Let yourself be amazed. And don’t worry about what other people say — people who’ve long forgotten how to see the world with wide-open eyes. Come back to the aaaaahhhhh, oooooohhhhhh, and booooooaaaaahhhhhhhhh. There’s no better time for it than right now.
This started life in German on reinergaertner.de, my blog since 1997. The English version was AI-assisted. My German-trained eyes may have missed a few things along the way. She’ll be right.