By Shazia Haq
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A few days ago, my toddler saw a bird with a very long tail.
It was a pin-tailed whydah sitting high in a sycamore tree in our local park. A rare sighting in Los Angeles. There we were, my boy and me enjoying a moment neither of us knew would happen.
He talked about the bird when he got home. “Mama, that bird was crazy.” He likes using that word now, “crazy.” I knew exactly what he meant.
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Much of life happens that way—unexpected and hard to plan for. It’s a vulnerability I have learned to embrace.
We're often taught to look for fulfillment elsewhere. In self-improvement. In optimization. In the next version of ourselves. The underlying promise is that a better life lies just beyond our reach.
But what if we've been looking in the wrong direction? To be truly well, should we be doing and wanting less and paying more attention? The experts seem to think so.
In college, I spent a week trying to live like a Stoic for the student newspaper. The experiment failed, but the idea stuck: some of life's deepest satisfactions emerge when we stop striving for an outcome.
In Andrei Tarkovsky's movie Stalker, a character observes: "When a tree grows, it is soft and pliable. But when it is dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions."
I've come to think the same might be true of us. Right before I wrote this, my son pointed out his cute shadow to me on a walk.
“Wow,” he said.
The earth spinning through space, sunlight traveling millions of miles before being interrupted by the shape of a small toddler, casting a shadow on a Southern California sidewalk, is, in its own way, very "wow." Miraculous almost.
As a mother, I'm learning that wonder often has terrible timing. It tends to find us when we're busy doing something else.
My son's instinct is supported by some data. Researchers say that a sense of wonder may be good for our health.
Susan Magsamen, founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, says humans are naturally wired to respond to creativity, nature, music, and art. Children, however, are still discovering how they experience the world.
"Children's brains are developing and the pathways of neural communication are forming, so they are absorbing this information and these experiences and responding to them in an unconscious and natural way," Magsamen told Newsweek. "This is why play, imagination, and curiosity need to be encouraged, and positive mindsets need to be fostered."
And wonder isn't just reserved for childhood.
"Draw in your notebook, dance, move, or sing along with a favorite song, pick up a paintbrush, study a piece of art, engage in nature, write your reflections or try your hand at poetry. Reengage the neural circuitry that we know is there for the arts...and see if it reawakens capacity for awe and wonder," Magsamen says.
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Victoria Maizes, M.D., the founding executive director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine and author of Heal Faster: Unlock Your Body's Rapid Recovery Reflex, recently experienced that awe firsthand.
Last month, she traveled to Iceland.
"I experienced immense waterfalls and shooting geysers and stinking hydrogen sulfide mud pots," she told Newsweek. "I hiked on mountains gathering and eating wild blueberries, and walked, slowly and carefully on glaciers and into ice caves, mini crampons attached to my hiking boots. I kayaked near seals."
What struck her wasn't just the scenery. It was witnessing the humility of being outside.
"I was observing, witnessing, and watching nature unfold," she said. "Repeatedly, I was awestruck by the magnificence of the landscape and sometimes by its stark beauty and power."
These small moments of awe can do more than inspire us.
"Experiences of the vastness of nature have been shown to reduce our stress," Maizes said. "They activate our vagus nerve [that connects the brainstem with the major organs], quieting and centering us."
It is easier said than done. Getting older can grant us wisdom, if we're lucky. It can also narrow our sense of the world, if we let it happen.
Perhaps that's why children seem to stumble into wonder so effortlessly. They haven't learned to hurry past it yet.
Shazia Haq is Newsweek’s Director, Newsletters.
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