Who says that life is just random and not part of some grand-scale, beautiful, collaborative, orchestral melody?
When you were young, you probably used to view the world with a wide-eyed wonderment - a magical place for the imagination where anything could happen and often did. It wasn't necessary to pull the experience apart with logic in order to believe in the extra-ordinary and you were free to share to your heart's content without anticipating its unbelievability. Because as a child, anything was possible and all experience was new. Your life was an empty canvas in the process of painting itself.
However, as with most of us, with the advent of looming adulthood, you probably learned that this part of life belonged in a carefully contained little box. You may have even put this part of your life away for good - never to re-visit - trading the 'extra-ordinary' for the 'ordinary' as a means to.....well, become ordinary. Your brain became the filing cabinet of organized labels and the master of editing what's useful and non-useful. And somehow the novelty of life wears off.
This is a normal process of life. However, it can affect the way we see the world and how we feel about our world and experiences. It's a phenomenon called, "Hedonic Adaptation". When we stop trying new things or stepping outside of our comfort zone (whether mentally or physically), we naturally fall into habitual stagnation. You can liken it to the happiness you feel having a truly delicious treat for the first time and then on your second or third experience, you no longer get the same heightened feeling about it as you did that first time. The thrill is gone.......
---> To learn more on this topic of Hedonic Adaptation in more detail: Article
However, these new experiences seem to expand our perceptual limits the most. We are meant to have these experiences in our life in order to continually evolve and grow - to reach newer and more amazing levels of achievement and creativity. Indeed, to literally outgrow the old model of who we were or perhaps even to assimilate the beauty and wonder that we are swimming in so that we can comprehend the astonishing possibilities we are yet to embrace.
“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour. ~ William Blake
Is our capacity to be astonished held in contempt by our selective bias or selective view of what is important or what we value as worthy of astonishment?
In a famous 2007 experiment, violin virtuoso Joshua Bell tried his hand at busking in a plaza of the D.C. metro, playing anonymously for nearly an hour on his priceless 1713 Stradivarius violin, a talent for which he is often paid $1,000 a minute. In the end, only seven out of a thousand passersby stopped to listen. He collected $32.17. When he finished playing each piece, there was no response from the passing crowd. But, as Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten noted, “Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.” ~ John Koenig, Wash. Post
To me.....LIFE itself is astonishing - from the moment our cells conspire to congregate in a mass functional congruency to the moment this organ called our heart miraculously begins to beat.
Somehow...life exceeds our expectations or what we consider possible every day (despite our proclivity to adopt hedronic adaptation)...and if by some chance of awareness we are called to notice the extra-ordinary, we might just find ourselves....astonished by what we see.
“Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such”
― Henry Miller
The capacity to 'feel' astonishment is what makes us unique as human beings. It is what provokes us to reflect and what grabs our attention from the ordinary.
To a large degree, our state of astonishment is intimately connected to our internal truth - who we are and who we are becoming.
Post Picture: Modified Source
