Amazement...

Have you ever really thought about the "experience of being amazed?" I would be amazed if you haven't.

As I sit in my easy chair, my laptop carefully balanced on...where else...but on my lap, thinking of something worth saying on this beautiful Saturday morning, it occurred to me how important "amazement" is in our lives. Amazing, huh?

Mr. Webster says the word amazement goes back to 1595. I find it "amazing" that folks before that were not amazed. Just think how amazed Christopher Columbus was when he stumbled upon North America. Just think how amazed Adam and Eve must have been to discover their own nakedness for the first time in the Garden of Eden. By the way, I think it is amazing that nobody has ever done a skin flick telling us the Adam and Eve story in pictures. Maybe they did and I just missed it.

In any case, Mr. Webster says that amazement means "consternation" and "bewilderment." A simpler word comes to my mind: "surprise." Things are amazing to us when they surprise us; that is when they challenge our sense of expectability. Amazement also is closely tied to our sense of belief and our ability to appreciate things in life.

Our beliefs shape what we know and they shape what we expect in life. In my view, amazement is an act of appreciation. At the moment something amazes us, we engage in an act of "appreciative inquiry," as sage David Cooperrider at Case Western Reserve University calls it.

I think it is good to be amazed in life. Sometimes we think we are so damn smart that nothing amazes us. Shock TV and journalism try to rob us of our ability to be amazed at anything that happens in life. Children have no problem being amazed at what they discover in life, unless of course they are inhibited by us adults from experiencing their own sense of amazement. Amazement, in this sense, coincides with innocence. Boy, we don't use that word much today, do we? When was the last time anyone said: "The President innocently submitted his budget to Congress for its approval."

Sometimes you have to be careful with your morning meditation sessions...no not medication...some "amazing" meta-thoughts, like the experience of our own sense of amazement, pops into our heads. Amazing, huh? Wow!