The Wonder of It All

In nearly every picture that I have of Jordan, as a young child, her eyes are as wide as dinner plates. I swear the kid never blinked, her eyes were as big as she could make them. I used to imagine to myself that it was because she didn't want to miss a thing.

One of the unexpected joys of being a parent is seeing the world through the eyes of your children. It's all new. It's all fresh to them. And, it's all very big.

Children don't have the tools or the experience to tell them that what they are seeing is not all that it seems. They're not sarcastic or cynical -- no one is born that way. They take the world at face value. They believe and they wonder.

I was constantly amazed at my children's constant amazement. I didn't realize how far down the jaded path of life I had wandered. But, when my children saw how blue the sky was, I saw once more how blue it was. When they laid in awe under a blanket of stars, I laid down next to them, to see what they were seeing, and what they were seeing was that the world was a wondrously immense place, and that they, small as they were, were an important part of it.

You've always heard it, and it's true -- wonder lives in the eyes of children. Children don't dream of being accountants, or lawyers -- they dream of being big things...superheroes, astronauts, underwater explorers. They want to go and see and do and touch and build and stand in awe of their own accomplishments.

Sometimes things really are impossible, but I've come to believe one thing:

Wonder + the impossible = Amazing

Wonder is why we went to the moon.  Wonder is why diseases are cured. For myself, wonder is what brings the view finder to my eye, and my pen to paper. It's why I treasure my role as a father. Wonder is being excited to know that we don't know everything -- to open your eyes as wide as you can, and to know that tomorrow something may just knock your socks off.

And when wonder gets you out of bed in the morning, every day has more possibilities than impossibilities. The world is beautiful and amazing and deep and broad, endlessly immense and impossibly small.

That's the lesson that those big blue eyes taught me sixteen years ago, and that I've taken to heart every day since -- let the world amaze you, and then don't be surprised when it does.


 And tonight, I'm grateful for the wonder of it all.