Wonder — Connection Course Series #2

Being in wonder helps you understand the value of the right question and If you’re in wonder, it’s a constant exploration. Questioning the assumptions that are in your mind is one of the quickest ways to get to wonder, where curiosity and awe are being experienced together. "It's really a point of view of looking at the world. Follow your wonder. It's a trail. Just follow it in the conversation about the other person, about yourself. In the conversation, just follow it." Most of us spend a lot of our time feeling a subtle pressure to know things, to understand our world so that we can make predictions, feel safe, and be seen as knowledgeable, but the moment we think we know everything is also the moment we stop learning. What if there's always more to the story than we can ever know? How might living our lives from a consistent place of wonder, give us more actionable information and opportunities than clinging to what we think we know? This is the practice of wonder, the W in VIEW. Brett: Joe, can you tell me what you mean by wonder? Joe: Yes, wonder is, there's a lot of ways to describe it, but one of the ways to describe it is to say we've all felt it before. We all know that like [exhale]. Maybe some of us haven't felt it since we were kids, but that's something that we all know. What it is, it's like curiosity without looking for an answer because when you're looking for an answer, you can just feel in your system that your system constricts a little bit. If you're just like, "Oh my gosh, what is happening here?" and there's no pressure to find an answer. An answer may come but there's no pressure. Then the physical state remains expansive. The other way to think of it is, it's like curiosity and awe put together. The thing about awe, the reason I use that word in particular is because if you're awestruck by something, you have a recognition that it's out of your control. It's something that's beyond you, beyond your ability to maybe even recognize in that moment. There's only a few things in the way that the human psyche works that creates that. Gratitude is another one, that creates that feeling of there's something greater. Acknowledging that you need things is another because just all these things are outside of your control often. Most of the time, we don't say gratitude, like, "I'm really grateful that I kicked ass." We might occasionally, but most of the time, we're grateful for things that are beyond us, and that's the thing about wonder. It has awe because we acknowledge that there's something beyond our ability to even maybe recognize. That's another way of thinking of it, but the other thing that's particularly important to VIEW conversations is that you're in the question. There was a time in my life when this question arose and it was, what am I was basically the question. I was in that question for 10 years, and it wasn't about trying to answer the question. It was about being in the question. I could come up with answers, but every answer was based on some context. I could say I am my body but then I would be in wonder for a while, and I'm like, "Well, which part of my body? If I cut my body in half, which part of my body is me?" To realize that even that isn't me, what am I? The power of that was being in the question. It wasn't ever finding the answer to the question. That's another way to look at wonder is that you're in the question. Brett: Right. It's like the moment you come up with an answer, it's like the search stops, but if you stay in the question, there's always opportunity for some other aspect to come in, like some other aspect of yourself to be seen. Joe: Exactly. Yes, that's beautifully put. Yes. Brett: How does cultivating a persistent state of wonder benefit us? What does this do for us? Joe: There are so many ways in which it does. If you just think about those times that you're awestruck, imagine a life when you're awestruck all the time and just imagine living a life where that is 10%, 20% more of your life, just even 10% or 20% more awestruck by life. There's this thought process that people share about miracles and that actually we're experiencing miracles all the time, but we're so used to them or we can describe enough of them. We can describe the sun, for instance. You can just be awestruck by the sun. You can answer forever how it got formed maybe and how it's working, or you see it every day so there's nothing to be awestruck about, but if you really just contemplate like, "Why? Why sun? Why universe? Why cosmos?" Goodness, how did it-- Yes, all this stuff happened, but how did it actually come to pass that we were circling the sun? It's just awe-inspiring and it leads you to places that yo

The Art of Accomplishment · Brett Kistler, Joe Hudson