My Hedgehog Teacher *

on the hunt for Wonder

Since my last post I’ve been thinking a lot about Wonder.

If I accept Staniforth’s claim that it’s a choice, then reclaiming it is up to me.

Yet to reclaim something requires knowing what you are looking for.

It’s a strange exercise to try to pin down something that by its nature is ephemeral. 

Much like love, wonder is something we all know when we experience it but it can be hard to describe how it happens. Perhaps that’s a good thing or it might lose its preciousness.  If it could be formulated, god knows someone would ruin it by trying to bottle and sell it.

I caught a tendril of what I was searching for one morning during my habitual cliff walk.  I turned a corner and heard an unexpected rustling in the grass by the side of the road.  In Portugal, there are lizards, snakes, rodents all manner of things that could be lurking on the edges of my path and not all of them welcome encounters.  Then I saw it.  A hedgehog.  They are wild here but shy and nocturnal so not common to see out and about.  It hadn’t seen me so I crept close and watched as it apparently built itself a nest on the side of the road.

I am going to do something quite embarrassing now and post the video I took to share with my daughter.  This is definitely not my grown up professional voice.

But that’s the point isn’t it.  We have to get out of our grown up self in a way.  The self that has been scarred by the weight of our years.  That knows better – that keeps itself safe with a well earned veneer of cynicism.  It’s the child in us that can still delight in the unexpected pleasure of stumbling on a hedgehog on the side of the road. 

What about this encounter filled me with such delight?  Yes, I have a certain fondness for hedgehogs, but it was more than that.  It was the unexpectedness of the pleasure that felt so rare and precious. 

I have walked this same route no less than 500 times and yet on one day – one day that I couldn’t have prepared or anticipated or forced to happen I got a special gift from life. 

That’s when I saw it: certainty is the death of wonder.

Bold statement, I know. (Do you like what I did there with the font LOL?)

However, stay with me for a moment.  Think about when you have been truly delighted – it usually involves some element of the unexpected. For example, if you go to a restaurant that you know is good then you already have an expectation about the result. If the expectation isn’t met, you are disappointed – but if it is met, you’ll merely be satisfied but you won’t be delighted. That can only happen if you have no expectations – in other words if there is no certainty.

Contrast this with stumbling on a little hole in the wall place that you have never heard of and might even look a little bit suss only to have an exquisite meal:  Pure delight. 

Perhaps it’s no wonder that so many people these days feel depressed and a little listless.  Our lives are structured for maximal certainty.  Weather reports, traffic reports, Google reviews, Angie’s list.  Technology in this regard is our friend. With enough data we can in theory eliminate all uncertainty from our lives. What have we lost? 

Who here remembers travelling before the internet.  Yes, it was a freakshow at times – no GPS – old guidebooks full of places that no longer exist – no cell phones to assist in quickly adapting to unexpected changes in plans. 

Yet, I will never forget the moment (one of many in my pre technology travel days) when I stumbled on Neuschwanstein.  If you can believe it I had never heard of it and then I drove around a corner in Bavaria and Bam! there it was looming in the hills above the clouds. 

It actually took my breath away. 

It looked like something out of a fairy tale. 

I can’t imagine this would have happened if I had seen the google images; read the reviews and plotted my course to go see it.

Photo by Bharat Patil on Unsplash

Perhaps that is why wonder is so hard to reclaim in mid-life.  The more we know; the more we’re certain of - the less chances we have to be truly delighted by life and to thereby tap into the childlike awe and wonder of all the magic that surrounds us.

~~~

I decided to learn to surf at the ripe old age of 53. 

It is really hard. 

I fall A LOT which I usually feel for days afterwards. 

Middle age body parts like to hold a grudge. 

I believe surfing is the ultimate test of tolerating uncertainty. At least as a newbie there are too many variables to have any confidence of standing up let alone a good ride. 

But on those rare moments that it all comes together out there and I manage to get my middle aged body erect on a wobbly board being jostled by unpredictable waves and ride it to shore there is only one word for it:

Wonder.

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• If you haven’t seen the movie My Octopus Teacher - go see it. It’s amazing and touching and then please stop eating these amazing and intelligent creatures. Ok end of my soap box / public service announcement.