I’ve resolved to never google the reason for morning dew. With each day and year of my life, fewer and fewer things inspire a sense of childlike wonder in me, and morning dew is one of those things. So I hang on to the morning dew, and I hang on to the fact that I have no clue what the cause behind it is. How strange that every morning I can wake assured that the grass outside will wet my bare feet! How strange that I have no clue why! As my childhood grows farther and farther from my present, I grow to relish the awe-inspiring more and more.
When I read “Margaret” to the book club, there were pages that produced gasps and exclamations. Being told that mosquitoes can have hundreds of babies didn’t shock me; it didn’t even cause me to bat an eye. But for all the kids of the book club, it was a different story; the knowledge that Margaret has 367 babies was almost too much to handle. I wasn’t expecting to have to stop and let that information settle because I had simply accepted it without any wonder and moved on.
At what point of our lives do we lose that wonder? Does the hardened cynicism come with age? Does it come with years of, “because that’s the way it is”s and, “why does it matter?”s? Does it come from living in a culture where science has the power to explain away everything?
More importantly, can we override whatever the reason is? Does more knowledge and years have to mean that we are left unimpressed by anything and everything? Or can we remain in that state of curiosity and wonder beyond childhood?
I believe we can. I believe we have to practice, we have to work to see the wonder, but I believe we can stop to remind ourselves that’s okay to be awed by the small wonders in our lives: the fact that grass somehow gets wet before the sun rises every morning, the fact that a caterpillar locks itself up in a homemade little room and emerges days later an entirely different creature, the fact that there’s a plant that eats bugs, the fact that the earth is spinning but we’re not dizzy all the time, the fact that there are 1 billion trillion (yes, you read that right) stars in the seeable universe alone, the fact that certain animals pop out eggs which are beyond fragile yet able to protect their little ones until they hatch, and so on. The world is amazing, the things inhabiting it are amazing, the God who created it all for His glory is amazing. I believe it’s part of our job as creation to work at recognizing these wonders with the utmost delight.
Hannah Furcinitti; Director of Media and Publications, President of the Book Club