A Month of Wonders

           I am alive and I am here.  I find this an amazing thing.  Why should I be alive, and for that matter why should I be alive here and now writing this reflection on wonder?  I think that Descartes had it wrong. The first thing for me to consider is not "I think, therefore I am."  It is, "I wonder why I exist."  And it is not the fact of my existence but the act of my existing that I need to consider.  It comes down to a matter of focus.  To speculate on the fact that I exist makes me a spectator of my life, able to comment on it something like a Monday-morning quarterback.  The real question is why my existence interests me to begin with.  It is because I am moved deeply by its pulsation beneath my hands.  I am primarily interested in my own life because it is an ongoing drama with which I am intimately involved.  My life is not a fact.  It is a project I am working at as we speak.  My life is a hot prospect, not a cold objective fact that I can pull back from and comment on from above.  My life as I experience it is full of wonders, and wonders are best understood as surprises and as mysteries and as unfolding, unwieldy moments of opportunity which arise and fade away never to be heard from again. 

             I dare not approach my life as a catchable, held-in-my-hands kind of thing, something that I can hold onto and stop from wriggling about long enough for me to measure and label it.  The primary experience of my life is as a flow and a thrust from where I happen to be now.  It is more like a sporting event than a performance piece, like a play.  A play is a done deal.  No matter how often you become involved in a play it always turns out the same way.  This is because it is scripted, and the ending is a foregone conclusion.  Not so with my life.  I am swept away as a participant in its outcome, and I am always anxious to discover this outcome though I am never quite able to get a good grip on it, because my ending hasn’t happened yet.  Like a sporting event, at one moment my life's outcome seems to favor one resolution, then at the next moment as the momentum shifts a different ending shows itself as the most likely outcome.  My life unfolds as if I am living it, not as if I have already lived it.  In my living I am walking through the forest, not surveying it from a safe distance away.  Sometimes I am lost, sometimes I am clearly on the way, sometimes I fear that the way I have chosen is the wrong way, yet how can I be sure since no better way has shown itself? 

           This is why I first come upon my life with wonder rather than an intellectual attempt to comprehend it.  I am taken aback by my life and all it involves.  It is like mercury in my hands.  It is there but constantly slipping through my fingers.  And so I don't stand back and watch it.  I let myself admire it and take it in and glory at the one fact I am sure of:  My life is always more than I can think about it.  So I have learned to appreciate my life and be grateful for what I can understand about it, even though there will always be more.  That is why I approach my life with wonder, not with speculation as if it were a puzzle to be figured out.  My life is wonder-full, and therefore I exist wide-eyed and amazed at all I find out about it.