Writing Equations to Solve for Wonder

questioning how we engage people's awe and wonder drives

I had grand intentions of writing about personal responsibility this week. Truly, it had felt like the most salient distillation I had in my personal life these last few weeks. And when the time came to write this post - it was gone. 

In its stead was a question: how do we use wonder and awe to find a sense of connectedness and a felt experience of our world? Lately, any scrolling on instagram yields carousel posts of facts and figures on any given movement from regenerative agriculture to public health. My email inbox is full of newsletters looking at “the data” for everything from mental health to the water crisis in the West and beyond. We are inundated with numbers and, yet, I wonder, is this data moving the dial?

Which dial you might ask. Well, the dial of how we connect to the issues that are most important to us. The dial of how we experience our relationship to issues that matter. The dial of how we engage people outside of our siloed movements. The nature of a dial is that it’s variable, it can be turned down or turned up and there seems to be a presumption that numbers will turn up the dial on change. A hard number of how many harvests are supposedly left on earth will get people to finally engage in the regenerative agriculture movement. A statistic exploring our national average of yearly sugar consumption will finally move the dial on how we look at nutrition in childhood and beyond. Perhaps this figure on the rise of depression will finally have us look at societal factors that are actually causing people to feel so depressed in the first place. 

We are more data-driven than ever. We’ve even gone as far as to term this data we seek “the science.” As if “the science” is static and singular instead of evolving, at times malleable, but certainly complex and multi-factorial. Any news headline will offer you what we supposedly seek in terms of data, more evidence for us to do “the right thing” and not the “wrong thing” (which inevitably, those people over there are doing and you wouldn’t want be like them would you?)

My argument is simple: while these might turn the dial up on our anger, our capacity for othering, and our collective fear, they are not turning the dial on our sense of agency, connectedness, or curiosity. 

In a mechanical sense, a lever is a beam that pivots on a fulcrum. On one end, a load is placed. In order to lift the load, an effort must be exerted on the opposing end of the beam. Imagine for a second that the ‘load’ is an issue we want people to engage with. The effort with which we lift that load is the way we engage people. My guess is that it would take a lot more anger, frustration, and fear - all weighty emotions - to lift the load than it would for awe and curiosity, which are naturally buoyant emotions. These are levers that we can use to gain a sense of ‘leverage’, meaning we can use them to our maximum advantage. Often times, the force put on a lever is by an authority or an outside power in order to achieve a particular outcome. But what if these levers, instead, were meant to maximize our own felt experience of things? Instead of ‘Fear’, ‘Control’, and ‘Scarcity’ these efforts could be called ‘Curiosity’, ‘Mystery’, ‘Awe’, and ‘Wonder’. 

Andreas Weber writes in his book the Biology of Wonder: 

“Poetic ecology restores the human to its rightful place within “nature” — without sacrificing the otherness, the strangeness and the nobility of other beings. It can be read as a scientific argument that explains why the deep wonder, the romantic connection and the feeling of being at home in nature are legitimate — and how these experiences help us to develop a new view of life as a creative reality that is based on our profound, first-person observations of ecological relations.”

Take soil as an example.  

Let’s say that I tell you there are 60 harvests left on Earth (something that has been debunked - and really, who could have the hubris to say they could measure it in the first place). How do you feel?

Now, let’s say that I tell you that are 1 billion microorganisms in a single TEASPOON of soil. And that soil is crucial to a thriving food system. How do you feel now?

This could quickly devolve into a treatise in media manipulation, but because we’ve all heard enough of that narrative and I know you’re smart people that know that you’re being manipulated in order to drive profits to a very small number of corporations, I’d rather skip it. Like focusing on fear and scarcity, focusing on the problem is not nearly as interesting as focusing on the myriad of possibilities the problem presents. Notice I said ‘possibilities’ and not solutions; I reject the idea that some of these problems within our society could be “solved” for, like an algebraic equation where x=2y and x is supposed to be representative of the whole of the climate or environment. These are not problems that will be solved so much as they will be continually transformed. 

When we leverage curiosity we are fundamentally asking people to become mentally engaged. Fear at a biological level, disengages us. Wonder draws us closer, where control pushes us away. Awe leads us to look for the abundance instead of what is scarce. These are the emotions of transformation; they are what happens when we allow the wonder of our world to transform our own inner landscapes.

Curiosity, wonder, and awe all share a common request - they ask us to pause. They are not emotions or experiences that we feel when we are rushed and busy with the bustle of our lives. They are encounters that happen when we slow down, when we take a moment to observe and orient to our surroundings, whether they are physical or informational. That buoyancy of creative engagement happens when we allow space and time for it to rise, like cream coming to the surface of raw cow’s milk. 

Let’s return to all those microorganisms inside the soil. When we elicit that sense of wonder, it naturally lends itself to many branching trains of thought. What do those organisms do? How do they interact? In all soil, like the soil in my front yard? I never thought that so much life could be teeming beneath my feet. How do I nurture and work with those organisms? These are questions that take us down paths of exploration, that begin a relationship with a topic, and lead to a sense of investment and perhaps, true felt connection. You can actually feel the ground beneath your feet. That felt experience first transforms you before you can begin to transform the possibilities that your connection to it opens up.

I own a small butcher shop called Western Daughters where we focus on regenerative agriculture and what I consider ‘meat as a byproduct of conservation.’ I’ve spent the last decade since its conception noodling on how to get people engaged in just how meat is raised in various settings, what makes it different, and how ruminants and other animals impact soil and the ecosystems they inhabit. I don’t want to get on a soap box or prosthelytize the customers that come through our doors because I want them to feel a sense of welcome and belonging. So instead, I sell them the best steak they’ve ever had - the steak that is perfect for their tastes in fattiness, texture, and mouthfeel. Why? Because 9 times out of 10 they come back and ask the question: “That was the best steak I’ve ever had. Why was it so good?” And that opens up a conversation about all the practices and people that go into raising good meat. In this example, awe and wonder and flavor are the levers that spark true interest in a new topic. 

Awe asks us to look below the surface. It’s not found in statistics, but in the pausing to take in the experience of something. Some of these are everyday encounters: the incredible patterns on the leaf of a plant in our office, the transcendent flavor in a cut of good meat, the way time stands still inside of a meaningful conversation. Some of the wonder happens in a much larger framework: the way a shoveful of soil can contain miles of mycelial networks, the plasticity of our brains that allows for new connections to be made in every moment, the interconnected relationships inside of an ecosystem. And it’s below the surface that we find our connection to things, which leads to our investment in their wellbeing alongside our own.

I won’t pretend to wrap this up with a bow when I don’t have one. I am still trying to solve for wonder in my own life, much less to engage wonder at a societal level. But it feels that this pursuit is worthwhile.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Albert Einstein that begs the question - what is humanity without wonder?

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

What do you think? How can we engage people’s wonder drives?