CHILDREN AND THE NATURE OF WONDER

I was five years old when I asked my mother why do we feel hungry again after eating. She paused, gazed at me, astonished and replied, “Because food tastes nice and everybody loves to eat.” I remember smiling and almost laughing at her answer - not just because it was that funny, but because it felt right at the time. That answer didn’t explain the science, of course, but it quenched my sense of wonder. It acknowledged the biological mystery and the poetry of not knowing. It was the first time I recognized wonder, not just in hunger and food, but in the way a simple question could bloom into a deeper necessary but often neglected aspect of knowing.

Now, half a decade later, I watched my younger brother Vasco, only four years old and relentlessly curious, spin on circles on my living room carpet, practicing his interviewer culture - always questioning, silly or not. But just curious. Vasco asked if the room ever gets dizzy. The way he says it - head tilted, eyes wide and voice so low (wonderful as a child) - is not just a question but a challenge to the universe: show me something new, something impossible and something that delights me all at once. And I thought to myself; children are not only little humans, they are unfettered explorers of the unknown. They live in wonder just as we live in routine.

Wonder, as children experience it, is not just an awe. It is the oxygen of their existence - that which make up their life.

That way, children differ from adults. Where adults seek explanations, children seek experience - by facing everything as an alien and wanting to know them all. The adult mind, shaped by traffic, taxes and deadlines, tends to categorize, label, resolve and discard certain things it considers “unnecessary”. We make explanations of the blue sky with the reflections of the sunrays from our water bodies, the rainbow with prisms and emotions with neurotransmitters. Children, however, do not limit their quests; they expand infinitely - wanting to get an answer for anything and everything they can imagine or thing of. 

And that’s the essence of wonder.

Vasco narrated to me how he hates being caught by strangers - perhaps enemies - in his dreams. He told me “sometimes I be so quick that when enemies chase me in my dream, they never catch me. Alas! last time a stranger caught me and almost beat me until I wailed out loud”. He then asked me, “Can I be always that fast so they never catch me again?” Baffled, I sat there stunned, grasping for an answer. Reminiscing about my biology lessons on the neurological explanations and the subconscious processing of the mind I had learnt years ago, but I couldn’t reason any better than saying, “No, you can’t. Just try being that fast whenever they come”. 

A childish wonder that irritates laughter and anger at the same time!

It’s not that children don’t want answers as such, they do surely. But the questions always come from a place so unusual and never touched by our slightest thoughts and curiosity - maybe because we just conclude “it doesn’t matter”. I remember Vasco complaining, one morning, about whenever he wanted to forget something, it just doesn’t happen but instead he forgets what he never intended so quickly. And he asked me, why? I offered some vague explanation about brain development and memory, and he nodded, unfazed. His curiosity had already moved on - from biology to the natural world, from the natural world to whether animals also have brain and whether, they too, can dream.

Stupid? Maybe being stupid is necessary in learning, that children recognizes yet we (adults) don’t.

Slowly, slowly, challenged by my own childhood (also childish) experience and that of Vasco’s unending questioning about anything and everything, I started to think wonder was a childish thing. That to mature was to shed the wide-eyed delight in the world and simply accept it as it is, not as it ought to be. Because that would, I thought, leave us ever pessimistic and least appreciative to the natural world. Behold, now I believe quite the opposite - wonder is not childish, it is wisdom in its rawest form. To wonder is to admit either we don’t know, or we’re not sure about something. Either way, it’s conceding the fact that we’re ignorant about something - And that excites me. Children do this naturally. Adults forget how.

And so, we lose touch.

We, then, lose the joy of rain on our palms, the thrill of watching the wind gently flap the leaves in our premises and the quiet awe of watching an Ant carry something thrice its size. We trade this for the news cycle, for cynicism and for scrolling and swiping through manufactured earths in our hands until real magic goes unnoticed.

But sometimes, if we’re lucky, a child brings us back.

Known! Philosophers have long debated the nature of wonder. Socrates claimed it was the beginning of wisdom. Descartes saw it as a survival mechanism. Aristotle considered it as the beginning of a philosophical inquiry. But children don’t philosophize about wonder - they live it. They don’t need theory. They are the proof of it.

Baffling? Perhaps! I begin to think; what if we never outgrew wonder, but we only misplaced it? When did questions become burdens instead of pride to learn something new? When did we start to say certain things don’t have answers and so we don’t bother to ask? Now, we think we’ve outgrown fairy-tales and magic, yet we have only replaced them with different stories and our claimed “busy schedules” - things we consider them for progress, profit and entertainment.

Useful, yes. But wonderless!

Sometimes I think we don’t need to trace the Greek mythology to identify philosophers. We have them just within us - Our children. They ask the same questions; why do we die? Why is a Cat, a Cat, not a Dog? What is time? And what causes pain in dreams? Unlike adults, children don’t fear asking these questions. They just wonder, ask and wait. Because wonder isn’t childish, it’s for the brave. It’s for those willing to live the in-between, in the questions that don’t have easy answers.

So now, when Vasco asks me something I can’t explain, I don’t just rush to fill the silence. I say, “What do you think?” And then listen - not just to his answer, but to his wondering. Because in that space between knowing and not knowing, something sacred lives.

Children already live there. Adults have to choose it.

One night during our bedtime, I sat next to the sleeping teenager and reminisced on the question; “Why is a Cat, a Cat, not a Dog?” I was still sure I didn’t know the answer. But I was sure I would always remember this - the way a child reminded me to think of the natural world, to ask, to wonder.

And maybe, in the end, that’s just enough.

💬Creative Non-Fiction

Author: Charles Anyama Kalisto

5th Year Corporate Law Student (BA.LLB-HONS)

Marwadi University, Gujarat - India.

🖎 Writer