In Search Of Wonder

Let me ask you something:  When was the last time you experienced something that was truly indescribable? 

By indescribable, I don't mean something that's extraordinarily intense but that you could honestly sketch out in words if you really had to.  I mean something that is somehow beyond words completely, beyond literary devices, beyond what you could ever define in exact terms.

I have a theory about that.

You see, when we were children, we literally didn't have the words to describe our experiences.  We weren't that great at expression, so a lot of times we just didn't bother, or we only ventured out far enough to outline the basics of what we were feeling.

Wasn't there a magic in the air, sometimes, during those moments? 

And then in school we learned to think about the world in a whole new way.  Instead of just living life, now we actually had to think about it.  There was a name for everything, from the way light shatters into colors when it shines through a prism to the particular brand of conflict the author put the protagonist through in your favorite novel.  Not only did we have to memorize all this, we had to practice conveying the world and our experience in ways anyone else could understand.

Instead of experiencing life as an experience, we began to see it as a collection of concepts we observed through our senses that was interchangeable from one person to another and added together through some kind of Calculus to make the moment what it was.

The movie was good because the depth of story-building multiplied by the character development raised to the power of the emotional impact, minus the number of plot holes, was greater than or equal to my expectations.

If we could break something into its component parts, it was thought, we could understand how it worked and then put the pieces back together in innovative ways.  We could turn abstract concepts into something somebody else could understand and replicate.

I wonder now why people seemed to think that that was such a good idea.  Pulling life to pieces to find the magic glue holding it together is reminiscent of the man who killed the goose that laid the golden egg, trying to get to the precious repository inside, only to discover that he had just destroyed the very thing that made the miracle possible.  Even if we do understand some things about our existence better than before our education, we have lost the reason it was important in the first place.

I don't believe life, or anything else, is the sum of its parts.  I don't think giving everything a name gives us more power over what really matters.  There are some things beyond understanding but not beyond experiencing.  There is a whole world of wonder that is impossible to reach in a kingdom of merely definable things.  And the thinking that only things that can be counted or explained matter will never allow us to burst through to the other side.

How do I know that?  Because I've experienced those indescribable things.  I know they are real, far more real than taxonomies and nomenclatures or even the physical world around me.  More real tastes kind of strange coming off the tongue.  Maybe it's because the thing I'm actually getting at never does.

When was the last time you let yourself experience without words?

When was the last time you placed the reality you felt ahead of rigid, dissecting logic?

When was the last time you stepped to the edge of a cliff and expected to fly?

Isn't it interesting that I'm literally using this post to try to express the inexpressible?  But in reality the only way to succeed at that is not to try.  It's one of the few things for which giving up is far more helpful than persevering.

The danger of letting the untouchable drift out of awareness is that meaning and hope sometimes go with it.  Reducing life to the sum of its parts, an endless cycle of self-perpetuating birth, work, and death, makes one think of that bleak phrase from Ecclesiastes:  All is vanity.

What can the man do that cometh after the king?  Even that which hath been already done.

In order to escape that triviality, you have to have a place to run to, a place foundationally different from reductionism.  A place where the ideal is possible and miracle and reality mix.  Such a situation can never be found by science, because by definition science only  has eyes to see defined things.  You have to stand at the perimeter of the known world and thrust your hand into the impossible.  

Not impossible as in so difficult that victory is inconceivable.  I mean actually physically impossible, like breathing in outer space.  You have to be willing to stare  into the sun and say it doesn't exist.

Why?

Because the world gives us coherent, logical explanations of how things work based on evidence we can see and touch and hear, and the only way to get past it is to reject it.  Reject it even as, by necessity, we don't actually walk out of the spaceship without a suit.

Reject it, even as we grudgingly bow to its demands.  The heart doesn't have to kneel when the knees do.

There is a part of us that knows things we were never taught and believes what we have never seen.  There is a vitality to that piece that withers and begins to decay if we choose to believe only what our surroundings tell us.  But, indestructible as it is indescribable, the knowledge never truly dies but instead becomes dormant, retreating deeper and deeper inside.

To call it out again is the quest, and decision, of a lifetime.

What does it feel like to be free from the unforgiving uniformity of everyday living?  To see more than what crosses the retina and hear beyond what pounds the eardrum?  To have reason to believe in a brighter tomorrow when there is no more light in the sky?  What does it feel like to have liquid life running through your veins?

It feels like this:

But then again, it doesn't.

Because, after all--  

There are moments no amount of description can capture.

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