[TRANSCRIPT]

Hello, friends. It's the first week of 2021 and I thought I'd just take a moment to acknowledge the weirdness of trying to make resolutions given the strange world that we're in right now. Given that many of our resolutions hinge on planning, and the ability to plan is exactly what last year stripped away for so many of us, the vast majority of us, pretty much the whole world, and it’s still unclear if 2021 is going to be any more predictable, I thought I'd invite something a little bit different, something that can affect everything else in your world, and another kind of a resolution that I rarely hear about.

I know you’ve heard lots of talk about mindfulness from me and I’m sure from many other people in a wide array of fields. One of the core principles of mindfulness this idea of the “beginner's mind” as a key to everything. Today I’ll highlight that the basic foundation of beginner's mind is the ability to experience a sense of wonder.

So in addition to whatever else you're thinking of for 2021, I suggest having "invite wonder" as one of your resolutions. Particularly in this year where so many things are going to be the same or will be disappointing or will be hard, wonder can be a great counterpoint. But this year, more than most, you'll have to seek it out, to consciously cultivate it.

It's very easy, especially in our modern society, to fall into feeling jaded, into comparing to expectations, into routines that actually strip you of wonder because you stop paying attention.  

Often people feel a sense of wonder at seeing a place of great natural beauty for the first time, or through travel, or through experiencing other things that are new and surprising. This is finding the novelty from outside of themselves and that's usually an easy shortcut to wonder. 

But since this year we're still going to be restricted in travel, and you're going to be surrounded by familiar things (often overly familiar things that you have been stuck with for months) how do you actually invite wonder? You’re going to have to cultivate your mindset. Wonder is available to you, if you shift how you’re perceiving the world.

I heard a story about a Zen master whose primary practice was to pour tea every morning. He would do it the same way, in the same order, every morning, for many years. One time a student asked if he ever wanted to learn something new. The master replied yes, of course - but only after he’d learned everything there was to learn about pouring tea.

Back to this world and your situation in 2021. I have a few suggestions and ideas, and then I'm going to read you something that keeps playing in my mind anytime that I feel like I'm short on wonder.

I suggest taking some time to watch sunsets or the dawn. If you’re someone who usually pulls out your phone or a camera to take a photo, leave those devices at home and just watch the light change. Imprint it on your memory.

You could put on headphones and then close your eyes and listen closely to a piece of music that makes your heart swell, something that you know really well, and just completely lose yourself inside of the music. 

You can look closely at a photograph or a painting, or some other piece of art seeking out something that you hadn't previously noticed. Seek to discover something about the process of making it or something else about the medium that is new for you. 

You can engage in something ephemeral or with an element of chance, like creating art with sand or found leaves, or looking at snowflakes through a microscope, or growing plants from seed, or learning to forage, or learning the songs of birds in your area, and then go listening for them in the wild. 

You could even simply read a familiar book aloud if you haven’t done that before.

You can engage in anything with a sense of wonder, because it really depends on your perspective on it, not on the thing itself.

A good reminder of wonder for me has always been the opening of Bill Bryson's book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything." I read it many years ago and it's been echoing in my mind ever since. 

So I’m going to read you an excerpt of it. I invite you to practice listening with an open mind, free of expectation, and even free of previous experience. It’s a little beginner's mind practice.

“...for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, co-operative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under-appreciated state known as existence.

"Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don’t actually care about you—indeed, don’t even know that you are there. They don’t even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single rigid impulse: to keep you you."

"This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is fantastically mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulphur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements—nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary pharmacy—and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is, of course, the miracle of life."

"But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent, it has been suggested—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

"The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself—shape, size, colour, species affiliation, everything—and to do so repeatedly. That’s much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, g...