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- 🌀🐇 #316 a reason to wonder, growing softer, you can just do things
🌀🐇 #316 a reason to wonder, growing softer, you can just do things
Plus maxxing treats life as a problem when it’s a mystery
⚡️ Enlightening Bolts
🌲 The Human Capacity for Wonder: Faisal Rahim argues that explanation should deepen awe rather than replace it, drawing on research into awe and curiosity to suggest that a good answer can be the beginning of our attention instead of the end of it. Read it here.
🧩 Maxxing Treats Life as a Problem When It’s a Mystery: Philosopher Håkon Evjemo traces how science-backed self-help curdled into “maxxing,” the ruthless optimizing of sleep, looks and status, and turns to Gabriel Marcel’s difference between a problem to be solved and a mystery to be lived for the antidote: “don’t fix existence, be open to it.” Read it here.
☁️ Whimsical Hobbies to Pick Up When You’re Bored: Angela Situ of Meridian Literary offers five gentle hobbies for restless afternoons, from naming clouds after the shapes they take to writing fairy tales of 100 words or fewer about a forgotten teacup, each one a small way to find wonder in the ordinary. See it here.
🎇 Image of The Week
Lightning’s strange upper cousin. High above the most violent thunderstorms, a different kind of electrical flash can bloom in the sky: a red sprite, glowing somewhere between about 50 and 90 kilometers up, its jellyfish shape trailing tendrils for only a few milliseconds before it vanishes. Photographer Florian Riou forecast storms off the Spanish coast and scouted his angles so he could line up the Corsican village of Montemaggiore with whatever might appear above storms 500 to 700 kilometers away. That night the sprites kept coming over Barcelona, until one enormous flash filled his camera screen with red. Photographed by Florian Riou. See it on Instagram.
👁 A Reason To Wonder
One of my ultimate aims with this newsletter is to re-enchant its readers.
I want to invite you to become mystified by our predicament and spellbound by life. To scrub away cynicism and enshrine the mundane in magic.
I know this world sometimes feels like a careening ball of tragedy and misfortune.
From my vantage point, one of the best ways to navigate our earthly challenges is to recover the miracle of being alive.
To fall in love with life itself.
There is good reason to see the world with eyes of wonder:
No matter how grim things get, you can’t get swallowed up by the darkness because the simple fact of existence is already an incomparable, enormous gift.
Every human being is radiant in their own right.
Every day carries its own kind of shine.
I’m not saying your difficulties don’t exist.
I’m saying the beauty around us deserves to be paid at least an equal amount of attention.
And by doing so, we become bolstered and heartened for the moments when tragedy inevitably strikes.
These letters are free and always will be. If they’re worth something to you, you can support the work here. Always optional, never expected.
🍼 Growing Softer
Reflect on these words from Blake Kasemeier:
If you’re finding it increasingly difficult to see the magic in a painfully ordinary world, I suggest sitting next to an 18-month-old on a porch in Glendale, California on street cleaning day.
As the neighbors hunt for parking like someone who dropped their cell phone in a mosh pit, as your work chat begins to percolate from a company-issued laptop to induce your company-issued anxiety, the little one will begin to notice the dust tsunami making landfall at the corner of your street and they will rise like some kind of diaper-clad royalty to address their public.
And you will think about how many street cleaning days you have resented. How when you were younger and you lived not so far from here, days like these helped you acquire enough parking tickets to have your license suspended. Yet here you are, on the edge of your seat, ready for the big show.
How everything is like that. A million worlds stacked on top of each other, and that is why growing up means growing softer. Not softer like weak, softer like permeable, like the threshold between you and feeling a little bit of magic at 8:35 on a Wednesday morning is literally just outside your door before work with your kid.
🤓 Learn This Word
Thaumazein: Greek for “to wonder” or “to marvel,” from thauma, a marvel. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates says wonder is the feeling of the philosopher and that philosophy has no other beginning. Aristotle agreed in his Metaphysics: it was through wondering that people first began to philosophize. For the Greeks it was less a passing feeling than a threshold, the moment something familiar stops making sense and you are moved to look again.
🕸️ From Around The Web
How to be more agentic
“The moat of low status is one of my favorite concepts, courtesy of my husband Sasha. The idea is that making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.
It’s called a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side and because it gives anyone who can cross it a real advantage. It’s possible to cross the moat quietly, by not asking questions and not collaborating, but those tradeoffs really nerf learning. “Learn by doing” is standard advice, but you can’t do that unless you splash around in the moat for a bit.
[…]
Agency is the skill that built the world around you, an all-purpose life intensifier that lets you make your corner of it more like what you want it to be, whether that’s professional, relational, aesthetic, whatever. Build a better mousetrap. Have an enviable marriage. Start a country. No one is born with it, everyone can learn it, and it’s never too late.”
🎬 Endnote
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With Wonder,
Mike Slavin
