⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

💗 How to be more emotionally intelligent without trying so hard: 50 insightful tips from Joe Hudson. Read it here.

🌱 The Cult of The American Lawn: Manicured grass yards are ecological dead zones. So why are they being forced on people by their neighbors and homeowner associations? Read it here.

🗓️Your Life in Weeks: Create a map of your life where each week is a little box. Try it here.

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🎇 Image of The Week

On March 8, 2021, Karina Oilani set a Guinness World Record for the longest Tyrolean traverse over a lava lake, covering a distance of 100.58 meters (329 feet, 11.76 inches) above the Erta Ale volcano in Afar, Ethiopia. This daring feat took place over a volcanic lava lake with temperatures reaching approximately 1,187°C (2,168°F). Oliani, a Brazilian adventurer, environmentalist, and wilderness doctor, undertook this challenge as part of her lifelong passion for extreme outdoor expeditions and her desire to connect with nature’s most powerful elements. Her traverse was meticulously planned, involving months of preparation and the use of specialized heat-resistant gear, and was celebrated as an inspiration for International Women’s Day in 2021.

👁️ Grown Up Sense of Wonder

Why is it that whenever we hear the phrase sense of wonder, it’s almost always paired with the word childlike? As if wonder is something we’re destined to lose as we age. As if it's a phase we’re meant to grow out of.

But why should that be true? And more importantly—how do we rekindle it once lost?

I believe it’s possible to possess a grown-up sense of wonder. Childhood, from an evolutionary standpoint, is a phase of exploration. We're allowed to roam under the umbrella of parental care because, if we're lucky, the necessities—food, shelter, safety—are provided for us. We don't need to cultivate resources. We get to look around.

But as we grow, there’s a narrowing that happens. We shift from exploration to exploitation—meant here in the neutral sense: how can we now use what we've discovered to survive? Our survival is no longer outsourced. We must provide for ourselves.

And in that shift, the magic door to wonder often shuts. Wonder is dismissed as a childish thing—left behind like toys we’ve outgrown. But that’s a mistake.

Maintaining a sense of wonder actually requires deep intellectual humility. It’s the recognition that the familiar world we see around us—the one we’ve labeled and categorized—is not necessarily the known world. We know what things are called, but do we truly know what they are?

A grown-up sense of wonder is about returning—stepping back through that magic door. It means resisting the temptation to believe we’ve figured it all out. It means honoring the questions we once asked—the endless “whys” that adults tired of answering—not as naïve, but as profound.

This kind of wonder doesn’t ignore the adult need to survive or the responsibilities we've taken on. It simply refuses to let them become the entire story. It remembers that all of it—all our striving, building, learning—is still happening inside a vast, unknowable mystery.

And that mystery is beautiful.

G.K. Chesterton said, “The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.” There is so much in this world that can still dazzle us—if only we remain capable of being dazzled.

So this is just a reminder: despite what you've been told, you don’t have to outgrow your sense of wonder.

🧠 Brain Food, Delivered Daily

Every day Refind analyzes thousands of articles and send you only the best, tailored to your interests. Loved by 528,799 curious minds.

🌊 Crest of Infinities

Stew on this sentiment from John O’Donohue:

🤓 Learn This Word

Ukiyo: A Japanese word referring to the floating world - living in the moment, detached from the bothers of life.

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked link from a previous edition of 🌀🐇

Carl Sagan on Mystery, Why Common Sense Blinds Us to the Universe, and How to Live with the Unknown

“In our recent On Being conversation, NASA astrophysicist and exoplanet researcher Natalie Batalha said something that stopped me up short: as sentient beings endowed with awareness, we are “the universe itself becoming aware.” Echoing poet Diane Ackerman’s lovely notion of “the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else,” Dr. Batalha added: “It took 13.7 billion years for the atoms to come together to create the portal to the universe which is my physical self. So in that statement is this idea, or the fluidity of time and space. And I kind of see it all at once. And I don’t know what ‘me’ is. I just feel part of everything. And I feel such deep gratitude for being able to take this conscious look at the universe — at myself as being part of the universe.”

The sentiment reminded me of a beautiful interview Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934–December 20, 1996) gave shortly after the premiere of his epoch-making documentary Cosmos, later included in Conversations with Carl Sagan (public library).

In late August of 1980 — two years after he conducted Susan Sontag’s most dimensional interview and nine years before his magnificent conversation with Leonard Bernstein — interlocutor extraordinaire Jonathan Cott visited Sagan’s home in Los Angeles to interview him for Rolling Stone. In the soaring the conversation that followed, Sagan stepped into his native nexus of the scientific and the poetic to contemplate our understanding of the universe and of ourselves, the nature of reality and of human knowledge, and how to live with the unknown.”

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