Sense of Wonder

Last week I was in Hyderabad to see off my parents, who were out on a trip to the US,  more significantly to Alaska. Apparently a college time dream of my dad's....... Geologist and all that, na. And while discussing Alaska, I'm like.........do you think you'll get to see the Aurora Borealis?

And he's like, yes, good thought, let's see....... and he brings out this book:

A Readers Digest Publication: The World Around Us 

Precious Precious Copy

One look at it, and I simply went cold. I'd forgotten it existed, but seeing it now brought back such an onslaught of memories. Each page I turned brought back a memory. I must have read it cover to cover a million times. And the brilliant pictures must have set fire to hours and hours of imagination, and that's why that impact.

And I was thinking how in those days of before Google, our sense of wonder came from such books. Those were far away lands, mysterious, never reachable...strong triggers to imagination and wonder. Lack of access seems to fire so much more imagination and desire. It's interesting. I don't know if today's kids have that sense of wonder to anything at all. It's like everything is a possibility. 

In principle that sounds like a good thing. That anything is a possibility. Their ability to just be........ live in the moment....is way higher, and at a more conscious level than we ever did.   I have a lot of faith in them........so, sense of Wonder aside, I'll stay with that belief  :)

For myself, seeing the Aurora Borealis is on my bucket list. For those not familiar, these are lights seen around the magnetic poles of the northern and southern hemispheres. Auroras that occur in the northern hemisphere are called 'Aurora Borealis' or 'northern lights' and auroras that occur in the southern hemisphere are called 'Aurora Australis' or 'southern lights'. They occur  due to the collision between gaseous particles in the Earth's atmosphere with charged particles released from the sun's atmosphere, with extreme variations in colour, ranging from mostly green and pink to  red, yellow, blue, and violet.

Want to experience this in real ...........insha allah :)

But above that, what I wanted to talk about is in itself...the sense of wonder. We don't need a book to enable it.......it can be anything, a sunrise, a blade of grass, a child laugh, a kitten mew....but lets be enough in the moment to see it......to recognize it.....to acknowledge it.

It adds an underlying layer of beauty to life.