Hold Onto the Wonder

During the Christmas break from school , I took my grandson to our local Science and Discovery Center. One especially interesting display demonstrated how "monsters" are made for TV shows and movies, and he masterfully punched the buttons to make the dinosaur thrash its head about and open and close its jaws menacingly. We saw the process of their creation from the drawing board to molding and painting the form to their electronic circuitry. The resulting appearance and movement are pretty convincing—except we could see how all of it was done.

We learned (quite accidentally) that the gears flattening a penny into a souvenir impressed with an image of the Center do not use a penny at all, only a blank piece of copper. Yes, it has the figure of Lincoln on the back, but that too is part of the stamping process. You don't really think that the organization would deface property actually belonging to the Federal Government, do you?

We saw the Bubble Man do things with his bubble wands that seemed almost magic—except he told us it was just water and liquid dish soap. (It has to be Dawn Classic, he says.) He made huge bubbles, jiggling bubbles, a bubble within a bubble, and whole clouds of bubbles.

At eleven years, my grandson doesn't believe in magic or the reality of monsters, but he hasn't yet become out of sorts with how the world works. He was eager to see everything we could cram into our hours there, and declared it great fun. It was wonder-full.

Too often we adults get a tired, I've-seen-it-all attitude, and we ignore the true wonders all around us. We need to hold onto the sense of awe that children have—until it is discouraged out of them by adults with a tired, I've-seen-it-all attitude! We would be amazed that hummingbirds can hover mid-air, and that we can fold paper airplanes that glide and stall and land. We would marvel at the inventiveness of humans who have learned how to travel into space and back, and that we can blow a bubble big enough for a person to stand in. We would be in awe of the Milky Way and a "tornado" in a glass cylinder. Sometimes we have the opportunity to share with someone an experience or a place which we previously enjoyed. There is vicarious pleasure in sharing it with them for the first time, and we perhaps enjoy it nearly as much as we did originally. That is because its wonder has been restored.

Keep your eyes open. Hold onto the wonder. No matter what this New Year holds of the difficult and unexpected or of the very ordinary, look for the wonder-full!

MaryMartha

Art from http://sxc.hu/