The Will to Wonder
Uploaded by Bag puss on Jan 17, 2006
What happens to that wonder, the sense of life and discovery that every child is born with? Have our children fallen so deep into conformity and fear of questioning that it is hurting our societies skeptical mindset? Jack Smith seems to think that it is a mixture of puberty and rock music that has taken away our will to question. The real question we are trying to answer is why. Why have people lost the will to wonder?
When I was a little boy I questioned everything from why, I have to go to bed to why the ocean tasted salty. When I slowly came to the realization that questioning everything was not “polite” I decided to lighten up on my wonder. In school I was ridiculed for asking too many questions and force fed the answer “just because that’s the way it is.” When I do something wrong I learn from my mistakes, my mistake was asking questions.
Our society is very much on a “need to know” basis. If something doesn’t directly effect us we don’t need to worry about it. So can we say our society is to blame for our lack of wonder? In schools we put restrictions on questions. We scare people into thinking that questioning is wrong. It isn’t necessarily that we don’t ask questions, it is more that we ask the wrong people.
At least once in every persons life they will run into the sign that says “dead end.” We do not know who to go to for answers or how to ask the right questions. It is rare that we find the answer to our question right away. Yet we all look past our greatest resource, ourselves. This is our “big problem”, we ask so many other people questions yet we fail to ask ourselves these questions. The answers to most any question lay within ourselves.