Where is Your Sense of Wonder?

Reagan and I went for a walk tonight. Going for a walk without the stroller means that we won’t necessarily get far (she is one), and it means that we meander back and forth and all over the place. We are fortunate to have a place near the house where there aren’t cars and she can roam around freely. Tonight she delighted in chasing the robins and squirrels, running down the grassy hill, and stopping many times to delicately touch and smell different flowers along the way.

At one point, we weren’t able to get into the field that she wanted to go (the sad-ish photo next to the fence). She loves running around in the field with me chasing her, but we couldn’t get in since it is a high school turf field with surrounding track and not open to the public.

I convinced her to keep walking up the hill and around the next few curves, where we could access a different field that was just open and filled with white clover flowers. She LOVED these flowers. I think it’s the first time she’s experienced them and she would crouch down and pick a few and smell them, then run a few paces and crouch down again, pick some, smell them, and giggle in delight. She did this for a long time, occasionally bringing a flower for me to smell, and only pausing from her floral pursuits to look up when she heard an airplane (see photos below).

Kids teach us so many things (can I get an amen???)—and as we were walking, I was thinking about her disappointment initially when we couldn’t run around in the field. Sometimes in life we encounter hindrances to where we think we want to go. But perhaps, just up a hill and around a corner, there’s something even better—a field filled with flowers and an open sky to see planes fly by. I love Reagan’s sense of wonder at what, as an adult, is so seemingly mundane. We grow up, and as we figure out how the world works, as we get bumped and bruised by this thing called life, we lose our sense of wonder. Reagan makes me pause and enjoy the flowers (aka weeds), delight in fuzzy racing squirrels, and stare in awe at the big metal birds in the sky.

What causes you to pause and stare in wonder and delight?