How to Live in Wonder

The Wisdom of a Dandelion — A Tribute to G. K. Chesterton

There are some writers who give us information.

There are others who give us ideas.

And then there are a rare few who make us look at the world again.

G. K. Chesterton was one of them.

Reading him, one discovers that the extraordinary does not always announce itself with trumpets. Sometimes it appears quietly—in a flower, a child's face, a sunrise, a bird, or simply in the astonishing fact that we are alive.

One of Chesterton's thoughts that stays with me is his call to rediscover a “burst of astonishment at our own existence.”

What a remarkable expression.

We spend so much of our lives waiting for something extraordinary to happen that we forget the extraordinary thing that has already happened:

We exist.

We have been given eyes with which to see the world, ears with which to hear it, a mind with which to wonder, a heart with which to love, and a life in which to experience it all.

And yet familiarity has a strange power.

The sunrise that once delighted us becomes “just another sunrise.”

Rain becomes something that interferes with our plans.

A flower becomes something we have seen countless times.

A bird on the balcony becomes merely a bird.

We stop being astonished.

Chesterton reminds us, almost playfully, that perhaps the problem is not that the world has become less wonderful.

We have simply stopped looking at it with wonder.

The wisdom of a dandelion

Think of the dandelion.

It is not a rare or exotic flower. It does not demand attention. It grows almost unnoticed, sometimes in the most ordinary places.

And yet, look at it properly.

A tiny seed becomes a living plant.

A green stem rises from the earth.

A yellow flower opens to the sun.

Later, a delicate globe of seeds appears.

The wind carries those tiny seeds away to begin the mystery all over again.

How many times have we walked past such a flower without seeing any of this?

The dandelion does not need to become a rose to deserve our admiration.

It is wonderful simply because it is what it is.

That is perhaps one of Chesterton's great gifts to us: the ability to recover amazement in the commonplace.

He makes us understand that wonder does not necessarily require a journey to some distant place.

It may be waiting outside our own window.

A crow arriving because it remembers where it is fed.

The first drops of rain.

The changing colour of the evening sky.

A child's laughter.

The fragrance of a flower.

The familiar face of someone we love.

The simple miracle of waking up tomorrow morning.

To live in wonder

Perhaps living in wonder does not mean being constantly excited.

It means not allowing familiarity to make us blind.

It means occasionally stopping in the middle of our busy lives and asking:

Have I really looked at this?

Have I really listened?

Have I noticed how extraordinary this ordinary thing is?

As we grow older, perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is the ability to become a child again—not childish, but childlike in our capacity for astonishment.

To see the moon and still look up.

To hear thunder and still pause.

To watch rain and not immediately reach for the phone.

To see a bird and wonder where it came from.

To notice the first light of morning.

To be grateful simply for another day.

Chesterton's wisdom is not merely about flowers or childhood or imagination.

It is ultimately about gratitude for existence itself.

And that is why his words continue to speak to us.

He reminds us that life does not have to become bigger for us to appreciate it.

We have to become more awake to the life we already have.

Perhaps that is what it means to live in wonder.

To look at a dandelion and see a miracle.

To look at a crow and see intelligence and life.

To look at the sky and feel small—but wonderfully alive.

And sometimes, just sometimes, to stop everything and experience that “burst of astonishment at our own existence.”

Thank you, G. K. Chesterton, for reminding us to look again.

The world has not lost its wonder.

We have only to rediscover our eyes.