Wonder, Play, and How to Be More Alive

We build our lives around structures of certainty — houses to live in, marriages to love in, ideologies to think in — and yet some primal part of us knows that none abides, knows that we pay for these comforting illusions with our very aliveness.

Wonder — that edge state on the rim of understanding, where the mind touches mystery — is our best means of loving the world more deeply. It asks of us the courage of uncertainty because it is a form of deep play and play, unlike games, is inherently open-ended, without purpose or end goal, governed not by the will to win a point but by the willingness to surrender to a locus of experience and be transformed by it.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer celebrates this lens-widening, life-deepening property of wonder in her incantation of a poem “Intention”:

INTENTION
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

To wonder. To wonder with no plan
for where it might lead. No strategy
for arrival. No finish line. No pot
of gold. No perfect score. No striving for.
To wonder. To wonder the way a small child
might wonder when seeing a roly poly for the first time —
oh, look at all those legs. Look at how
it curls! Look how it moves again. Feel
how light it is in the palm. Feel how
it tickles as it moves. Imagine
an awareness that new meeting a life form that old.
Can I be that new as I meet this infinite world?
To wonder not just with my mind
but with my belly. To let every neuron
spark. To notice where there is a channel
and imagine the great wing of life
is scraping it clean so the stream might flow
in new ways. To wonder beyond the edge
of the known, and in that spaciousness, play.

Couple with Mario Benedetti’s enlivening poem “A Defense of Joy,” then revisit Johan Huizinga’s classic century-old meditation on how play became the fulcrum of civilization and Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living.

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For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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