Perhaps only a sense of wonder will save me

If asked what this year was about, the answer would be far from heroism. It has required loads of endurance - specifically, the stubborn refusal to surrender one’s attention entirely to various facets of pain.

Psychology, and psychotherapy in particular, often frame mental health as regulation: calming the nervous system, managing thought patterns, reprocessing memory. These are indispensable skills. Yet another faculty, more fragile and less easily systematised, tends to receive less emphasis -the capacity for wonder. A gentle, sustained openness toward what exceeds us. Perhaps only a sense of wonder can save me - it doesn’t mean that all possible suffering must be eliminated, but perhaps it can be situated within a wider interior space in which suffering is no longer the sole narrative.

Wonder is not naïveté. It does not deny cruelty, betrayal, or loss. In fact, it often emerges most forcefully in those who understand how precarious meaning can be. Attentiveness to beauty is therefore frequently misinterpreted as innocence, as though pausing before what is delicate implied blindness to what is brutal. Yet such attentiveness does not arise from ignorance; it arises from a refusal to confuse cynicism with depth.

Alain de Botton has argued that philosophy should help us live, not just think. Understood in this light, wonder becomes less an abstract disposition and more a practice of perception: sunlight lingering across a wall; leaves shifting along the Rhine; the saturated colours of a winter sunset; the scent of rain on roses; music that settles against the chest with almost physical tenderness; heavy clouds briefly illuminated by evening light… When attention narrows around past injuries or daily obligations, such moments beautifully widen the frame of the mundane. They loosen the self’s grip on its own narrative and restore proportion.

Adversity tends to shrink perception. Vigilance becomes habitual; uncertainty is interpreted as dangerous. In such a condition, beauty can feel irrelevant, even offensive. What gradually restores vitality to life is not forced positivity, but the rediscovery of safety in perception itself. Wonder may be among the earliest signs that trust is returning to us.

There is something inherently therapeutic about beauty that asks nothing in return. In contrast to the relentless demands of optimisation and self-improvement culture, wonder allows reception rather than performance. It does not require coherence, productivity, or even hope. It only invites presence. In that sense, it offers respite from the exhausting labour of constant self-explanation, and I find that truly freeing.

Modern culture often treats such sensitivity as liability. In some environments, to be deeply moved by art, nature, or subtle emotional nuance is framed as weakness. Yet sensitivity may be precisely what enables durable endurance. It is the organ through which meaning enters the psyche. Without it, life may remain functional, but it risks becoming existentially impoverished. Psychologically speaking, wonder might be understood as regulated vulnerability. Unlike overwhelm, which floods the system, wonder expands it gently. It permits intensity without making it collapse.

There is also an ethical dimension to wonder. When we remain capable of being moved, we resist becoming cruel. Lack of regard often masquerades as intelligence, but it is frequently a symptom of complete emotional exhaustion. Wonder, by contrast, preserves a moral imagination. It reminds us that other people, like the world itself, are much more than the sum of their failures or the harm they have caused.

Wonder cannot be commanded. It doesn’t announce itself, which is precisely why it soothes. What can be cultivated are the conditions of its emergence: slowness, reduced noise, sustained attention to what we love without immediately instrumentalising it.

Perhaps only a sense of wonder will save me - not because it’s a guarantee of happiness, but because it keeps something essential safe: the conviction that life remains addressable, that it continues to speak even after devastation, that one is not sealed within a private realm of pain but remains in dialogue with a world capable of offering more than heartbreak.

In the end, wonder does not rescue from suffering. But it is an assurance that life continues to unfold beyond our wounds in wonderful ways, and that our attention, however fragile, can still meet it without falling apart.