"I Wonder if That's True"

When our children were young, a group of families with similar aged children would occasionally vacation together for spring break. Usually, it was about taking turns watching one another's kids at a swimming pool or beach while the adults did adult things, but we would also sometimes pack up the cars and go on outings together. One year, we were in Palm Springs and decided to make a day-trip to the Joshua Tree National Park.

It was hot, the cars were crowded, the drive was a little too long, and the kids were frustrated at missing their day of unstructured fun. By the time we arrived, none of us were open to the strange, unique beauty of the place to which we'd come. The kids were complaining and the adults were bickering as we unpacked our picnic lunch.

I asked our daughter Josephine to take a walk with me. We headed off on a faint trail. After about 100 yards it led us around the corner of a Flintstone-esqe pile of boulders and suddenly we found ourselves alone in this magnificent, surreal landscape. Our pace instantly slackened and I felt my tension drop away as I involuntarily gave myself over to awe. Josephine must have felt similarly because after a moment of silence, she asked, "Do you ever wonder if we're just like tiny ants in a whole universe of giants?"

Awe is something we can't plan for. It always comes upon us unexpectedly. We can't force ourselves or our children to experience it, but we can venture out into the world. Indeed, that's the only way to experience awe: to leave the familiar, to separate from the mundane, to round a blind corner and encounter something bigger than ourselves. Awe is never found in the day-to-day familiarity . . . Unless you're a young child for whom the whole world is new. Then, a mirror or a ray of sunlight can stop us in our tracks.

It's sometimes said that the experience of awe is a reset button for the brain. It causes us to momentarily drop our preconceived notions and stereotypes, to become more curious and open-minded. Biologists and psychologists believe that the experience of awe makes us more likely to set aside our selfishness and band together for the common good in the spirit of survival.

Those of us who work with young children, I think, are more inclined to these experiences than adults who spend their days with other adults in hushed, predictable, indoor spaces like offices; routine, mechanized, repetitive places like factory floors; or noisy, whiney, customer-facing environments like shops and food service. Our modern economy is largely built upon eliminating surprises, which is to say we minimize the opportunities for experiencing awe in the service of profit.

But those of us with young children in our lives have direct and regular access to awe. Their awe at every day things inspires us, but more specifically we are awed by what they do and say and think and create. We find ourselves awed daily by their capacity to conceive of the world anew. It often takes our breath away.

When Josephine asked her question, I could answer "yes," because I had wondered the same thing, but in her company, in this unexpected place, I found myself wondering it again. Perhaps our entire universe is just a molecule in the bottom of a bowl of soup and the entirety of its existence occurs in the time it takes a giant to eat its lunch. Perhaps we are nerve cells in a giant's fingertip sending impulses of heat or cold or softness or pain along a chain of other universes that make up its nervous system. 

When we are awed, we cannot help but wonder, and it's impossible to not, in the midst of our awe, perhaps even as the heart of our awe, to see that we are all in this together.

As we walked in silence, our minds open, I said, even before the thought was fully formed, "Everything is either infinite or impossible." I wasn't even sure what I meant, it just came to me. I wasn't even sure I'd said it aloud.

After a moment, Josephine, replied with the voice of a great teacher, "I wonder if that's true."

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