Just be amazed!
it's good for you. (And it can change the world!)
I am prone to amazement. I have been for a long time.
This is a female Ruby-throated Hummingbird. I’m amazed by how tiny she is. I’m amazed by how lovely she is. I’m amazed by her aerobatics, zooming through life’s obstacles in a streak of shimmer-blur¹. But what I am most amazed by is the fact that the tiny, blistering speed of her wingbeats is so loud that when she comes to the window feeder on a summer morning, the hum travels inside my house, upstairs to my room, where my head is buried in fluffy pillows, and wakes me up!
I wasn’t always amazement-prone, though. I was once a cynical, sarcastic teenager. Then I went to college at a military academy. If there were any hints of burgeoning amazement during that timeframe, they were flash-withered before I had a chance to notice.
But somewhere into young adulthood, I realized that I liked being out in nature. And that translated to being out in nature alone, because there weren’t often many people around me with similar interests.
Out on some trail by myself, I began growing in amazement. I kept noticing things that were beautiful, and fascinating, and uplifting. It’s quite a habit-forming feeling, and I began to really look forward to any opportunity to be in nature, and just feel amazed.
The maple tree is best known for a couple of amazing features. It produces a fall foliage display that anchors an entire cross-country tourism industry. And you can tap it to make maple syrup. But you know what else? It blooms every spring. The whole display starts as a tiny red bud. It doesn’t look like much. One day, you wander out into a cool morning still trailing winter bits, and your maple tree looks fuzzy. Upon closer inspection, every tiny bud has opened into a blazing firecracker! The tree is covered in them! Once you’ve noticed them, it’s hard to stop noticing them, and you’ll look forward to them every spring.
Amazement has a spillover effect. A day job in the Air Force isn’t full of opportunities to be amazed at nature, but a tendency towards amazement will find material in whatever’s around. I kept being fascinated by everyone’s everyday jobs. Pilots, sure amazing. But to me…
Inventory? Amazing! Isn’t it incredible to think that if we don’t count these parts, planes don’t fly? Without parts, pilots are just pedestrians with fancy sunglasses, right? (Right.)
Baggage-throwing? Amazing! You mean we’re going to throw that entire giant pile of bags into that entire giant cargo bay? Can I throw some? (That answer is always yes.)
Another meeting? Whaaaaaaaat? Yeah, no, I’ve got nothing for that one. Not amazing.
My amazement grew so large that, on the way home from deployment with an overnight layover in Singapore, I decided I had to visit this nearby botanical garden - and my travel companions, this bunch of military guys, decided they’d like to come along!
They meandered around with me, bemused smiles on their faces, as I was drawn from amazement to amazement, exclaiming over one spectacular tropical plant after another. It occurred to me that they had probably come just because it was entertaining to watch me be amazed. And maybe that was a little bit of good in the world all by itself.
(And then we did all go to the bar. It’s still the military, after all :) )
What is this little beetle doing here? He’s spectacular, of course, shiny and mysterious, but so out of place. I expect to find beetles in forests and meadows and gardens. But this beetle is at the beach. On a rock, in the middle of the sand, near the ocean. I was entirely unable to identify him. Is he some unusual beach beetle, living on salt air and sunshine, instead of juicy lily leaves and all my tender squash? Is he lost? Is he on holiday?
I came to think of myself as easily amazed. And then my children came along, one, two, three. Children are excellent both at noticing in new ways (their eye-level is different than yours) and at being consistently amazed (everything is new). So noticing and amazement continued to grow with my three kiddos.
But then something happened that changed me, and taught me something new about amazement. From September 2022 to July 2023, our family relocated to Texas to care for my mom in her home during end-stage Alzheimer’s. Caregiving for this disease is tough. I knew it would be, I was really well prepared for it, and it was still tough.
I expected that, once Mom had passed, there would be a recovery time. I knew there would be, I was really well prepared for it, but it still surprised me. Because one of the things I realized, during this time of post-traumatic processing, was that I had lost my amazement.
I could no longer walk outside and just be amazed. I knew going outside was good for me, but my feelings about outside were all kind of distant and numb and wooden, like they’d been stuffed with cotton and packed in a corner of the attic.
But I could still remember how much I used to notice and be amazed. And I had to believe that I could notice and be amazed again.
I had to practice. I would pick a spot and sit down and remind myself. “Before, I would have just let my eyes wander all over these different mosses, appreciating all of their various textures, probably finding a teeny-impossibly-tiny little mushroom - oh, right, here’s one now! That’s amazing!” And a whisper-breath of amazement would ruffle the cotton, dislodging a few willowy strands into ether.
It was like physical therapy. My amazement was atrophied, and must be exercised to recover.
This is…a rock. Of course I find rocks amazing! Every rock you see used to be conglomerated into this molten mass in the deep earth, and now here they are on the surface, in endless varieties of color and shape and texture. These particular rocks are from Jasper Beach, Machiasport, Maine, where an entire giant dune of polished stones in green and bronze and red and white shimmer and rattle in the crashing surf all day long. Rocks. Are definitely. Amazing.
I’m on a good path again. Most of the cotton packing has been dusted away, and amazement is real and present and frequent again. So I’ve learned that amazement is less of a personality trait and more of a muscle. It grows with use. In fact, it requires use to stay healthy. It can be injured. You may need to rebuild. But if you need to, you can!
Amazement is a practice, and there are steps, which I’ll let you in on:
First, be curious. (Which should be as easy as falling out of bed in the morning. But sometimes we forget. And sometimes life happens. So sometimes, we have to buckle down and do it on purpose.)
Then, be amazed. (This will automatically happen if you’ve been curious. I guarantee it. It’s the way of the world. If you will just be curious, you will, without fail, be amazed.)
Then, be curious, again. (This will automatically happen if you’ve been amazed. I guarantee it. If you will just be amazed, you’ll be curious about something new soon after. )
And now you’ve been properly secured into an endless loop. You’re welcome.
Amazement is life-changing. Not life-changing in that way that’s on blast on every promotable surface in our noisy world. Life-changing in a way that’s quiet and encompassing and lasting.
The simple truth is, we can all, always benefit from becoming more amazed. And the whole world would benefit from each of us becoming more amazed, as well. Does that seem dramatic?
Here, of course, is a real-life example. (You knew there’d be one, didn’t you?)
This is a story about a Cardinal, and a story about us, as people, who live in the same world where Cardinals live.
Once, a long, long time ago, I visited someone I knew from college who had just moved into a new house in Florida. She was excited about her new house. It was a diamond-in-the-rough, a neglected rental with a cheap asking price, in a gated waterfront community full of expensive homes. She was looking forward to renovating and turning a big profit when she was ready to sell.
We were looking out at the back yard, a bit overgrown, with a tumbledown fence. She said, “Yeah, I just want something like gravel and pavers, where I can relax without worrying about pests.” Suddenly, I saw a flash of red.
“Oh, was that a Cardinal, do you have those here?”
“Um, I don’t know. Was it a red bird? I see red birds sometimes.”
“Yeah, it was red, do you think it was a Cardinal?” I was still excited 🤣
Fully annoyed, she snapped, “I said I don’t know. I’m not a bird person. It was a red bird.”
Here’s the thing, though. What if she had ever just been curious, like I had been at some previous point in my life when I saw a red bird? What if she had ever just wondered, for a moment, what that red bird was?
She might have discovered that the red bird in her back yard was, in fact, a Northern Cardinal. She might have discovered that the Cardinal is perhaps one of the most recognizable birds in the US. It’s the state bird for SEVEN states. There are *so many* sports teams with Cardinals as mascots. It’s the single most-featured Christmas card bird.
Cardinals are smart, bold, and easily acclimated to life around humans, so they’re a pretty familiar sight even in busy neighborhoods. They’re really endearing with that red mohawk and that bandit mask.
They have a beautiful song. They’ll visit your feeders and delight you with their engaging behavior. At some point, they will probably get feisty and hilariously attack their reflection in your window.
If she had been curious, she soon might have found herself amazed. That beak! That mask! That mohawk! Oh my goodness, he’s looking right at me!
A moment of curiosity, followed by a moment of amazement, could have changed the world in this one little Florida backyard, in a tiny but undeniable way in which every part of the equation would have been better off. A person who is curious, and then amazed, becomes a person who cares. A person who cares, connects. A person who connects, cultivates.²
Our moment could have gone more like this:
“Is that a Cardinal?”
“Oh my gosh, yes, a Cardinal! They’re so cool! They visit a lot, let’s put some more seeds out.”
“Oh wow, they’ve always been one of my favorites. Oh look at him, so feisty. He’s going to take that whole peanut isn’t he? Of course he is.”
“Oh, the neighbors had a nest in their bush last spring, I hope there will be one here…” etc., etc.
The Cardinal would have been better off. The backyard would have been better off. Our interaction would have been better off. And that shared amazement would have been available to strengthen relationships throughout the entire neighborhood. Who knows what ripples may have travelled from there?
What if you had an entire neighborhood full of people who thought Cardinals were amazing, instead of eyes gazing across back yards dreaming of gravel and pavers to keep away pests?
You see what I mean? A little curiosity, followed by a little amazement, which becomes a self-propagating endless loop, and it’s a different world entirely…
It’s just a birch leaf. Waving in the high branches of a mixed forest. In gently dappled light tousled by summer breezes. Glowing with sunshine. Generating energy from chlorophyll and light-drops. Inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. Shaped like a heart. Etched with the finest lace. Reminding me of all the love and hope and wonder in all the wide world. Just a birch leaf, after all!
So, be curious, and be amazed, and then do it again!
Being amazed may seem like it only affects us personally, individually, deep inside our own hearts…And yet, in truth, it’s precisely these little moments inside of every human heart that have the real potential to change the world!
¹Also amazing, after I had already drafted this essay and described my hummingbird friend as a streak of shimmer-blur, I happened to browse
's excellent essay Me and You and Everyone We Know - where I discovered that a group of hummingbirds is actually called a shimmer!
²I am often struck by the ways in which the things I am pondering in my heart in a given week align with the things other writes are sharing at the same time. In her stunningly beautiful essay,
reflects:We know comparatively very little about Swifts….Maybe that’s one of the reasons why they are globally endangered, because when we do not know or understand another being we become detached from the truth of it’s preciousness.
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"I’ve learned that amazement is less of a personality trait and more of a muscle. It grows with use. In fact, it requires use to stay healthy." Good to know, because if it were the first, we would just assume we have it or we don't and can't do anything about it, but the second; it's in our hands to go out and exercise that priviledge! This is such a wonderful essay, Sydney!
Sydney, My goal is to encourage people to exercise the muscle of amazement. Slow down - see - It is a world filled with awe, and we let it go by unnoticed. Cut from the same clothe, D