Abraham Joshua Heschel said that our goal should be to live lives in radical amazement. ….to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. What everyday things still give you a feeling of beautiful astonishment?
I am constantly amazed by my son. He is 1 years old and finds joy in the strangest smallest things. I think the best thing about being his mom is getting to experience life through his little amazed eyes even for the most mundane tasks. He got to wear short sleeves for the first time yesterday in awhile and he was so astonished when I put his sleeves on and they didn’t go all the way to his hands that he made a happy little surprised sound and danced!
What a great story Jenn! It is so easy to take the little things for granted like short sleeves! Think how wonderful that is that everything is a new discovery. When we are looking for what is new and different around us, we will find so much to be astonished about.
There are easy targets for beautiful astonishment such as looking through a pair of ordinary binoculars at the neighborhood birds (especially the Northern Flicker), but it seems to me that beautiful astonishment has almost nothing to do with the object you’re apprehending and everything to do with awareness/interpretation/willful thought. I’d make the radical claim that there is not a single thing that cannot be beautifully astonishing. Not death or decay, not feces, not hospital gowns, not fast food wrappers, not anything. Any/all can be beautifully astonishing with will and effort.
Absolutely! Thanks Justin. Your post reminds of Song of Myself by Whitman. In it, he celebrates the beauty and wonder of everything all around him. “The scent of this armpits, an aroma finer than prayer!”