Wonder Maintenance

topic

Wonder maintenance is the deliberate cultivation of the capacity to experience genuine astonishment at the familiar — to see the extraordinary character of what familiarity has made ordinary, to perceive the genuine mystery of what habituation has made unremarkable, and to sustain the sense of astonishment at existence's radical unexpectedness that motivates the deepest creative exploration. It is the adult's deliberate preservation of the child's natural disposition toward wonder that familiarity and expertise progressively erode.

Role

Wonder maintenance is the emotional orientation that most directly sustains the creative exploration that produces the most significant insights — because familiarity is the enemy of creative perception, and the sense of wonder that sustains attention toward the familiar is the antidote to the deadening effect of habituation on creative noticing. Richard Feynman's famous capacity for genuine astonishment at the quantum mechanical strangeness of the world he understood more deeply than almost anyone else, Einstein's sustained sense of wonder at the mystery of physical law, and the consistent observation that the most creative scientists maintain the sense of wonder about their domain that most experts lose to familiarity all establish wonder maintenance as a creative capacity rather than a personality quirk.

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