Wonder

                                             

  

     Ever since I was a child, I had a sense of wonder.  I looked up at the stars and wondered about them. When I studied astronomy my wonder increased. To think that the light from the stars had been travelling for years, for decades, for centuries until it reached the earth!  We are looking not at the stars of today, but at the stars of the past.  How vast is the universe! It is beyond our imagination. I would look upwards and marvel at all of it. How vast, how mysterious, how ineffably beautiful!

    I wondered at my own existence. I remember when I was seven or eight, I would lie in my bed and ponder the mystery of me. Is is not strange that I exist! Why did I exist?  Alone at night, I gazed into the darkness and wondered.

     I contemplated the vast ages before me. I read palaeontology books, and marvelled at the prehistoric creatures that walked the earth millions of years ago. Long gone, save for a few scattered bones.  The earth on which I walked was stranger than I had ever thought before. Once much of it was covered with ice.  Before that it was a great jungle.  Before that it was lifeless, and molten.  I memorized the names of the dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals and longed to go to the great museums where I could at least see their bones. 

    I lived in Baffin Island when I was a child. It was very cold and dark for most of the year.  Even in the summer the landscape was silent, no birds, no traffic, only a small village by a fiord, surrounded by mountains. I walked along the treeless tundra between the mountains and fiord, and wondered at the unearthly beauty of this desolate landscape. Unearthly compared to what I had known, yet very earthly. The moss of the tundra was bejewelled with countless flowers, flowers that would only bloom for the two months of the Arctic summer. It was all so strange, yet so compelling to me.

    I read books of science fiction and fantasy and wandered in worlds of wonder.  My reading moved from the sword and planet stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, to the high fantasy of Tolkien, to the terror of Lovecraft. Each of these authors kept me enthralled. 

    I wondered if life had any meaning. I could not believe that all this beauty happened by chance. Inside myself I felt aspirations towards something greater. Was this all there is? I could never believe that.
    Kant wrote: "Two things inspire me to awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within." Those were my sentiments exactly. As awesome as those things were, were they not but the signposts to something even greater? The splendour and the strangeness of the universe, the mystery of who we are, was all this something that we were supposed to accept as a brute fact, or did it  not mean something more?
     I wondered at everything, and my heart aspired to something that I could not even conceive.  My feelings of wonder made me search.  I did not know what I sought, but I searched.
     Have you ever wondered?