It is December 15, 2017, around 20:30. I’m in Oklahoma City, asphyxiating.
You see, on December 15, 2017, I’m watching The Last Jedi for the first time, and Kylo Ren and Rey are mid-whirl, going back-to-back to face off against Snoke’s evilly cool Praetorian Guard. I was asphyxiating because all my air was devoted towards producing a sound like “ohmanthisisreallyhappeningIcannotbelievehowawesomethisis”.
Believe it or not, this is not an unprecedented experience for me. It also happened in May 2003, the first time I stepped foot into Legoland Windsor. My little seven-year-old lungs started hyperventilating under the unbelievable fulfillment of (what seemed like) years of waiting, and now I was finally in a world made entirely of ABS plastic and little logo-stamped studs, an entire day ahead of me in the world of Jack Stone and Knights’ Kingdom. (To further communicate the magnitude of this experience, I had scrimped my first-grade allowance for what seemed like decades to have 100 quid with me as spending money.)
The years are short between Legoland and now. Time compresses as if I was in Windsor last week, not 16 years ago. Why do these memories persist so strongly, anchoring years of memory to a single moment? Last time, I asserted that one reason I remember specific moments is because I failed spectacularly. But, luckily for us, failure is not the only experience potent enough to brand our memories — there are also moments of wide-eyed wonder, of hopes fulfilled and expectations exceeded.
What produces wonder? I often think of wonder as something external — being awestruck by the beauty of nature or the supreme coolness of Jedi duels — but such a view is also a little reductionist. The truth is that the experience of wonder, subjective though it may be, is at least as dependent on the observer as it is on the object of wonder.
Case in point: If I had been live-Tweeting The Last Jedi on December 15, 2017, I find it likely that I would have been too distracted to fully anticipate the Kylo-Rey duel that was impending. My full attention and that wondrous moment would pass each other like Star Destroyers in the night.
Or, when I first visited the Grand Canyon, my utter shock at how cold I was competed with the splendor of the vista before me. And again, when I first laid eyes on Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, I had to consciously ignore how wet I was and how much money I’d just shelled out for audio-tours, in order to focus on the most magnificent piece of architecture I’d ever seen.
There’s a little quirk to this wonder-equation, though. If wonder is (partly) a function of our attention, we can rearrange the terms thus: We can produce wonder out of mundane moments through our thoughtful attention!
I first noticed this during my daily commute to Harvard during the fall of 2018. Boston in late fall is a depressing, rainy city, and the 66(6) bus that I took on a daily basis is a locus of that drudgery — every janitor and lab assistant on that bus is soggy, cranky, and overworked (and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, every person on that bus is a janitor or lab assistant). But as I stepped off the bus at Harvard’s Johnson Gate, and if I looked up from dodging puddles as I walked north, I was greeted by the following vista:
…Wonder “lengthens” our years, because our attention is focused on the things in life that are beautiful…
It’s not a hugely special building, but something about seeing wide-open sky (a rarity in Boston) interrupted by the ziggurat-esque steppes of the Science Center inspired a tiny spark of wonder in me. Nothing to make me hyperventilate, but when I took the time to look up, this building was the best part of my morning commute.
Notably, on days when the Boston winds were bitterer than usual, I kept my head down, and therefore missed an opportunity to experience wonder. It wasn’t good for my posture, either, and once I realized this, I tried to look up more often on my commute, even if it meant tripping over uneven bricks and icy patches along the way.
The days are long, but the years are short. Wonder “lengthens” our years incrementally, because our attention is focused on the things in life that are beautiful. Failure, too, lengthens our days, because our survival instincts try to make sure that we never suffer that same faux pas again. (Perhaps focusing on wonder is a way of retraining our neurons to value joy-as-survival more than safety-as-survival? Food for thought.)
So, then, we can synthesize a statement about memory given these last two essays: Life is a long routine, punctuated by fleeting moments of wonder and memorable failures. Therefore: lift your head and open your eyes wide, so that no wonder escapes unnoticed; and make mistakes with good humor and great frequency.