[3-minute read]
There’s a writing coach around whose e-bay window I occasionally lurk. She’s always pretty and smiling, or pensively curled up with notebook and pen. She entices me to write more, and more satisfyingly and more deeply, and to link up with other scribblers. Her messages sometimes inspire in a general way, they encourage without fail, though they may be too jasmine-scented, too chamomile and meditative and soft for me. (I sometimes write with Jeff Beck or The Propellerheads blazing in the background.) Perhaps I just resist for the sake of loonie-pinching resistance, carrying on in my own solitary way. Still, she has me wondering, and doing math about it…
Sarah’s recent e-blandishment was to join a virtual writing community that has a new emphasis each month. May’s is Wonder. She writes, “In their great new book, How to Design a Meaningful Life, Dave Evans and Bill Burnett share their wonder equation. Here it is:
curiosity + mystery = wonder.
When you know the equation, you see that wonder is always available. It’s a choice. You can find it in ordinary things, once you start looking. An apple, when you really think about it, is completely unfathomable…”
This image comes from Amazon, but please buy from an independent bookseller!
I wonder why and what?! and how?! and who was she in high school? and when will it be?… and I’m off to the races. We all are, when our curiosity isn’t strangled by routine or petty distractions — not to mention that my reflexive question is this: do these slim answer machines that we’re leashed to actually stunt or misdirect our engagement with life’s questions? My big sister loves her iPhone, and quick-drew it on me last weekend more than once to respond to my idlest who won/when’s the next game? queries with an encyclopedic recitation. Fair’s fair: I did ask, but there was precious little mystery attached to my bland microdose of curiosity. My question about smartphones stands, though I do admit that smartphones and the algorithms that fuel their constant use really can (he argues hypothetically, but without much conviction) prompt profound and useful investigations of mysteries more lofty than can you believe what this cat/these guys just did?
But I wonder, I do, how much and how often this kind of outsourced thinking encourages genuine curiosity about truly mysterious things. They are more likely, in my experience, to excite thoughtless engagement with banal and repetitive images, without a single idea in sight. I wonder.
Now, according to my notes, the force-of-authorial-nature Bill Bryson was on my Sunday Magazine CBC wireless radio as 2025 wound down. (Vacuum tubes, static fuzz-hiss, carefully calibrating the dial so I could listen while shovelling coal into the furnace.) (Okay, no, the CBC still lives in modernity; I mostly listen to its shows as podcasts on my iPhone. Driving. Walking. Or in this case, I believe the Mother Corp soothed and informed me while I loaded the dishwasher.) Bryson is mainly known for writing rich and funny travel books – Notes From a Small Island (England) and A Sunburnt Country (Australia), for only two best-selling examples – but I especially liked his 2003 departure, A Short History of Nearly Everything. It was an avowed non-scientist’s gigantically ambitious attempt to write the story of scientific discovery from the ancients to the 21st century. For the first two years of my family’s five-year unplan in northeastern China, nightly readings of Sciencey Bill Bryson composed my young son’s science curriculum. (When Dad’s an English teacher, you come to expect science as an exercise in storytelling, and what an amazing work of narrative non-fiction it was!)
And is, still and again and even more so! Bryson was interviewing with Magazine host Piya Chattopadhyay about his 2025 complete revision and
Bryson in 2020 (from The Guardian, a fine news site).
update: A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0. (This, despite his 2020 “retirement” from writing at age 68, as delightfully chronicled in The Guardian.) It was a tasty, engaging conversation, chock full of fun and fascination and – yes, I did remember where I was headed with this! — wonder. Piya wanted to know, after all these books and the over 20 years that had elapsed between original publication and this renewed re-telling of the greatest (and latest) adventures in scientific discovery: what feeds Bill Bryson’s curiosity? What makes the wonder mill keep on grinding?
I loved his answer. He’s a humorist by nature, but a relentlessly thoughtful and wonderfully wise one. He said,
“Here we are….We have this very short window of existence. Before we existed, there was this great eternity that we didn’t take part in, and when we die eternity will go on….But in between, there is this moment where we have the exhilarating privilege to exist. And I think it’s such a shame that we take it all for granted.”
So here’s the math: add Bill Bryson’s furious, curious desire to understand to the vast slowly revealed mysteries of the universe? The sum total is WONDER. Reverence. Amazement. And he moved me to want MORE.