The Wonder Gap
Created | Updated Feb 9, 2008
I enjoyed my visit to the homepage and 'benches' of John the Gardener so much I thought that it would be good to include one of his postings... ed.
For children, the world is full of wonder. Life is a marvellous continuum of strange new experiences. Every day brings with it a novel treasure, a new source of excitement.
Then, at some point in our lives, we lose this gift. We cease to wonder. We worry; we have doubts and fears; but, as if those feelings are all that we are prepared to take from a world beyond our control, we push our sense of wonder aside, lock it away in a chest with other childish things, no longer useful, a toy in a world of tools.
A commuter train rocks, and a thousand newspapers fold; a screech of brakes snaps the locks of a thousand briefcases. The train disgorges its cargo of dull-eyed human drones, who trudge the same tired steps day in and day out, every day of their tiresome work-a-day lives. They stand in line; they shuffle in line; and a thousand tweeds are etched into twice as many retinas, though none could describe the person in the suit. A baby or a blade of grass is just as likely to be trampled by the herd as it migrates into the city, then home again to the suburbs.
But who are these people? They really are people, you know, though it seems impossible to credit. Look inside their heads - carefully - you'll miss it the first time; but look closely; saw off the tops of their heads, and poke around inside. Every stuffy skull, crammed full of dust and cobwebs, contains the child each used to be; and every one of those children would rather skip and hopscotch home.
So why are we so dull? What made us, the laughing kids we really are, into such dullards, into such cattle? Whatever this parasite is, it blinds us to our misfortune and turns us into beetles, who go about our beetle business without a sense of having the life sucked out of us, without a sense that life should be more fun!
Something has made a hole in our sense of wonder. Like the holes in our planet's ozone, there are gaps in our natural ability to wonder; and just as surely as the ozone holes spell bad news for our planet, the wonder gaps mean doom for the people we once hoped to be.
Julia 'Butterfly' Hill is a person whose sense of wonder is so strong that she lived in a tree for two whole years. She thinks that trees are so wonderful that it's a terrible shame to saw them up to make kitchen cabinets and toilet paper. They are big... huge, magnificent things - living things - that make us feel like tiny ants. They live their whole lives standing in one place, yet their relationship to the world is every bit as rich and complex as ours. They struggle, they fight, they eat, they breathe, they fall down and die... and from their dust grow new trees. They succeed or fail according to their particular strengths or weaknesses, and are a part
of life in a way that human beings should rightly envy... or, more healthily, admire... like Julia 'Butterfly' Hill.
Yet few of us wonder about trees or the bright young human who sat in a tree for two whole years, which is a very sad thing, and a sure sign that there are serious gaps in our ability to wonder.
Space, the final frontier (as we used to say), is almost wonderful enough to make you swallow your gum. The very idea of not being on Earth, of floating about with your hair sticking straight out and being able to spit forever, is almost too wondrous to believe; it should, at the very least, give you hiccups. Half a century ago, the idea of going to space was so amazingly fanciful that to suggest the possibility without a wink was almost a sign of madness. But we've done exactly that: We, the best-dressed apes of planet Earth, have been in space, are in space; we’ve played games and written graffiti on the Moon (we've done some science too). We've built robots that have flown to other planets and even now are speeding towards the great beyond. For a fleeting moment all this stuff captured our imaginations, and we went mental... and rightly so! It was like finding out your dog could really talk, but had been playing dumb as a joke; it was like finding the label on the back of life really did say 'Fun Times For All'.
Then space fell through the wonder gap, and hardly anyone cares... about other planets or robots that are so far away the top of your head would fall off before you could really imagine it, racing off to say how cool we are to creatures we can't begin to imagine. When things go great we don't bother reading about it, or even looking at the pictures. When things go wrong, and bright young men and women look so crestfallen it should nearly break your heart, we shrug (perhaps with a mean little smirk) and tune to something we know will make us laugh... because we've seen it a thousand times before.
A lot of people grumble about the cost of doing wonderful things in space; it's a lot of money, when it's all in a heap; but it's peanuts when it's still in our pockets; we lose more every day down the back of the couch. Who wouldn't put a Dollar or a Pound, a Drachma, a Rupee, or a Shekel into a machine that revealed such wonders? How can we not care that people work and play beyond the sky? How can we fail to thrill to the notion of our message in a bottle being read by something frighteningly weird or by someone instantly recognisable as kin.
How can we afford to sleepwalk through life, when we have so little of it? Go mental! Find a bug! Blow spit bubbles on the train! Wake up to the things that are wonderful, for nearly everything is. Wake up... before it's too late!
