It is surely a strange moment to talk about… wonder. The world feels brittle. Dread has become a background thrum, and many of us find ourselves locked into a hypervigilant, doom-scrolling search for the next latent OMG headline or video. Beyond an “I wonder what the hell will happen next?” ruminative loop, openness to awe is mostly sidelined, displaced by a mode of awareness exquisitely well-suited for survival but less so for a mindful, open experience.
And yet, this may be precisely the moment when wonder matters most—not as distraction, but as orientation. Wonder is not a personality trait, nor a lucky accident. It is a trainable capacity: an aspect of mindfulness itself, cultivated through the deliberate training of attention in meditation practice. Let us wonder, then, how this capacity might be cultivated—for our patients, our students, and ourselves. This will be the first of a two-shot on wonder. We’ll define it here, then engage some meditative approaches to it in the follow-up post.
Back to wonder. No formal clinical definition of wonder is agreed upon, though most of us recognize the state without much struggle. The usual clichés quickly present themselves: mountaintops, first kisses (and, later, orgasms), psychedelics, cathedral ceilings.
These familiar examples are evocative, but also a little misleading. They frame wonder as an infrequent reward, reserved for special states, rather than as an attentional stance—a way of meeting experience that can be trained and accessed in both our ordinary and extraordinary moments. Wonder need not be something we wait for. It is something we can practice.
- Wonder is not a peak state or emotional high, but an aspect of mind—an outlook toward experience itself. It is receptive and open, resistant to rigidity. Less “Wow!” and more not-knowing, wonder is not a form of concocted amazement, but a way of allowing experience to meet us before it is fully named or explained. In this sense, I tend to think of wonder in a Buddhist way, as akin to the aspirational or “immeasurable” qualities that can be cultivated in practice—compassion, equanimity, kindness. We do not force these states into being; rather, we orient attention toward them, opening to a wide, somewhat abstract field in which they can arise.
- Wonder emerges when perception outpaces categorization. Novelty can certainly trigger it, but novelty is not required. Even the familiar, when met freshly, can generate awe: The thousandth look into a lover’s eyes may still reveal something new—new because the moment itself is new. Familiarity does not extinguish wonder; habituation does. And mindfulness can counter, can interrupt that habituation. So, weirdly, wonder is compatible with repetition, routine, and even boredom. As the legendary Thich Nhat Hanh often taught, we should always look with “fresh eyes.”
- Wonder is a form of contact—with body, other, world, the oceanic vibe. It restores reciprocity: It’s an opening to the best of that self/other contact in every moment.
It’s also why wonder can revitalize those of us in caregiving and teaching roles. It can be a salve for burnout and dehumanization, an antidote to (rather than bypass of) despair. Expertise aside, we can still meet mystery and wonder as we stay open to wonder.
Wonder quietly says, more is happening here than my expected narrative allows. And that recognition, in itself, is a wondrous thing.