Perhaps only a sense of wonder will save me
If you’d asked me what this year has been about, I might have said this: that enduring both the good and the bad has felt less like a heroic achievement and more like a calm, stubborn refusal to surrender one’s attention entirely to pain.
Psychology - and psychotherapy in particular - often teaches us to think of mental health as a matter of regulation: calming the nervous system, managing thoughts, reprocessing memories. These are invaluable skills. Yet there is another, more fragile faculty that tends to receive less attention: the ability to experience wonder. Not astonishment, not distraction, but a loving, lingering openness toward what exceeds us. Perhaps only a sense of wonder will save me? Not by erasing suffering, but by placing it within a wider emotional room in which suffering is not the whole story.
Wonder is not naïveté. It is not the denial of cruelty, betrayal, or loss. On the contrary, it often emerges most powerfully in those who have seen enough of life to know how easily meaning can shatter. Attentiveness to beauty, often in my case, is therefore easily misread as silly innocence, as though pausing to notice what is delicate or fleeting implied a failure to grasp what is brutal or irrevocable. Yet such attentiveness does not arise from ignorance, but from refusal to mistake cynicism for depth.
The philosopher Alain de Botton has often suggested that philosophy should help us live, not merely think. In this light, wonder can be understood less as an abstract idea and more as a lived practice: noticing sunlight linger across a wall, or pierce the leaves of gently swaying trees by the Rhine with its caressing rays; never missing a chance to admire a sunset’s vibrant colours; walking outside after a summer rain to inhale the faint aroma of soaked roses from a neighbouring garden; listening to the most beautiful music and letting it hug your heart; observing the improbable delicacy of heavy rain clouds gently joined by the lightness of the evening sun. When life feels confined to past injuries or daily obligations, such moments remind us that we are larger than the repetitive dramas of our own minds. They gently loosen the grip of the self and restore perspective, showing that the world has more to offer than what we have endured.
Living through adversity often narrows the field of attention, training the mind to be constantly vigilant and to interpret uncertainty as danger. In such a state, beauty can feel distant or even offensive. What gradually restores the spirit is the gentle rediscovery of safety - not only in the company of others, but in the openness of perception itself. Moments of wonder offer the first evidence that one’s soul is beginning to trust the world again, even if only for a few fleeting seconds.
There is something deeply therapeutic in beauty that asks nothing of us. In contrast to the relentless demands of self-improvement and healing culture, wonder allows us to receive rather than perform. It does not require coherence, productivity, or even hope. It only asks for presence. In this sense, wonder is a respite from the exhausting task of never ending self-explanation.
Modern world often treats sensitivity as a liability. Where I grew up, to be deeply affected by art, by nature, by subtle emotional stimuli, was framed as weakness, or at best as an aesthetic indulgence. Yet sensitivity may be precisely what enables noble endurance in the long run. It is the organ through which meaning enters the psyche. Without it, life may be technically manageable, but existentially barren. Psychologically speaking, wonder may be understood as a form of regulated vulnerability. Unlike overwhelm, which floods the system, wonder gently expands it. It invites us to feel more without demanding that we endure more pain.
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 willed. It comes unannounced, and that’s why it’s so soothing, if you happen to notice it. We can create conditions in which it is more likely to appear: by slowing down, by reducing noise, by allowing ourselves to linger with what we love without immediately instrumentalising it.
Perhaps only a sense of wonder will save me - not because it guarantees happiness, but because it preserves something essential: the conviction that life is still, in some way, addressable; that it can still speak to me, even after all that was awful; that I am not sealed within my private realm of pain, but remain in dialogue with a world capable of surprising me in ways other than heartbreak.
In the end, wonder does not rescue from suffering. 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.
