"You Won't Remember a Day on the Couch"

On President’s Day, myb daughter asked if we could go to Newport, Rhode Island and wander around. It’s only an hour away, she had never been there, and I hadn’t gone since my college days.

My son wanted to stay on the couch and chill all day (which sounded appealing, honestly).

“You won’t remember a day spent playing video games,” his older sister told him. “But if you come with us, you’ll build a new memory.”

And that’s how both kids ended up wandering on a local beach in February, collecting shells and sea glass.

In just about every talk I give, I point out that “you don’t need to go to the Grand Canyon or Sistine Chapel to experience wonder.” What makes awe such an extraordinary emotion is that it can be triggered by tuning in to the ordinary.

But that requires stopping the doomscrolling and tuning into your senses, as I shared with Seth Fleischauer recently.

It’s so easy to spend our days in autopilot — driving from the house to the pick-up line without consciously making a single turn. In the midst of the ordinary (even comforting) routine, we can train ourselves to become awe-seekers — to stop and breathe and allow the sunset or birdsong or kindness of a stranger to wash over us.

And also . . .

. . . . sometimes, injecting a little novelty into our lives can help. Because when you wander in a new neighborhood or travel to a new place or eat a new food, autopilot turns off. We can’t multi-task. The new stimuli requires our full attention.

That’s why travel can be a way to inject wonder into our family’s lives.

Maybe that travel is visiting a farm in a neighboring town or hiking on a trail you’ve never explored.

Perhaps you “travel the world” through food (I still have vivid, glorious memories of the first time I ate Ethiopian food 30 year ago — and the spongy texture of the injera bread that I used to pick up the unfamiliar dishes).

Or maybe that travel is a new state or country.

Anything new wakes up the brain and activates the senses — because senses are our brains’ warning system. Novel location? Our eyes and ears are on high alert — for danger AND (as a bonus) for wonder!

Last week, we traveled as a family to Bermuda for the first time. It’s a two-hour flight from Boston and a sensory-world away. At breakfast on our last day, the 12-year-old asked everyone for their favorite memory of the trip. My husband spoke rapturously about the fish sandwich he’d eaten at Cafe Ole (“the best sandwich I’ve ever had in my life.”) My daughter mentioned the parrot fish she had seen while wandering on an outcropping near the hotel, and her brother talked about their afternoon with the dolphins.

We visited the dolphins twice — once to observe and once to interact. That first day, after watching the pod leap and twirl and click and splash, my daughter turned to me and said, “Too bad you already wrote your book about awe, mom. You could have included this.”

Like so many of my 1980s peers, I had a collection Lisa Frank folders and a desire to become a marine biologist. I read compulsively about whales and dolphins in middle school. As a teacher, I read Karen Hesse’s The Music of Dolphins to a half-dozen classes. My favorite Star Trek movie? #4 aka “Star Trek: Save the Whales.” My very favorite podcast of the last five years? The Good Whale — the story of “Keiko” of “Free Willy” fame.

But this was my very first time seeing a dolphin up close. And I couldn’t stop smiling and laughing and tearing up and basically exploding with delight. Their song was more magical than any recording could express.

We returned to New-England-in-March — e.g. grey and cold. But we also returned to the peeper frogs. Last year they started singing on March 13 (I know because I wrote a whole ode to them last year!) This year, it took until March 22.

Their sound is magical, too. No matter how long or cold the winter, these tiny creatures start to sing in March. Spring has come.

As I wrote last year:

In 2020, the peepers woke up on March 13. How do I know? The kids’ schools had closed down that day (“just for a week”). We went out to a local diner — our last time eating out at a restaurant for two years. Over burgers and milkshakes, we told our Kindergartner and third grader we wouldn’t be flying to Disney World that weekend after all, a trip they had been looking forward to for months.

It was dark when we got home with our tearful children. When we stepped out of the car, I heard it: a chorus of frogs waking up to spring, unaware of the calamities taking place in the human world. The rest of the family went inside. I stood in the yard and wept in worry and wonder.

Awe is the ultimate “AND.” The world is messy and mean and complicated AND the peepers are singing, the dolphins are leaping, the beach is full of sea glass, and a chef in Bermuda is making otherworldly fish sandwiches.

Cheers to spring,

Deborah Farmer Kris * www.parenthood365.com

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