The sense of wonderment — How travel answers the most deep questions about life
What is it that we lose when we grow up — our idealism, which turns into recoiling cynicism, our innocence which is marauded by the harsh realities of the world or our enthusiasm, dampened by the requirements of time? The thing we lose the most is the ability to feel wonderment — the fundamental joy of discovering and appreciating the grandiosely complex world around us. The sense of amazement in everyday things, in the actions of regular people. Descartes claimed that it was innate in human beings; in fact, he called it our most fundamental emotion.
As adults, we live a life which betrays and alienates us from our most fundamental emotion. In our desire to fill this void, we crave to return to the magical place where wonderment is the order of the day, and it spurns us to undertake long journeys — of the mind when we lose ourselves in great works of art, of the body and mind when we pack our bags to seek out lands on which we haven’t laid our eyes before.
It took me about a day and half of flying to get to Argentina, and after a few blissful days in Buenos Aires, I landed in Puerto Iguazu, the city which developed around the Iguazu falls — the waterfalls of the Iguazu River on the border of the Argentine province of Misiones and the Brazilian state of Paraná.
Nothing prepares you for this unparalleled marvel of nature , given that you need a day just to see the falls in totality (And that too only the Argentine side!). My first glimpse of the falls itself filled the void of wonderment, as I was surrounded by cascading waterfalls till the eye could see. As I continued to navigate the upper and lower trails, the dimensions of wonderment dawned upon me. The sensory: wondrous things engage our senses — as we stare and widen our eyes, sometimes even rolling them. The cognitive: the perplexed feeling as our past experiences cannot comprehend the spectacle before us. It is accompanied by a suspension of breath, akin to the freezing response that kicks in when we are startled: we gasp and say ‘Wow!’ Finally, wonder has a dimension that can be described as spiritual: we look upwards in veneration, which swells our heart.
And as my mind and body fought this endless battle of wanting to experience this forever, I came upon the last sections of the falls, fittingly called the Devil’s throat, and it only one word could capture its true nature.
Ferocity — A word I thought was reserved for speeches that bring revolutions, poetry which brought down empires and attacking wild animals which could chill one to the bone. And then I arrived at the Devil’s throat. The sheer volume of water, the rapidity of the flow and the relentless beating down of the rapids as if it originates from the very core of the earth. Even the devil would shake with fear and venerate before this marvel. As for me, the mere mortal, I could only be swayed by the sense of wonderment it brought in me. The absolute ferocity of it makes you accept your puny existence, your insignificance in the grand scheme of things. And this realization presented to me the dichotomy of lightness and heaviness:
In our everyday existence, the heaviness of man’s search for meaning — our crushing desire to be unique, for our life to have purpose — to create things or influence lives in ways that we will be remembered after we are long gone. The fanatical need not to be a blip on the radar. A burden which weighs us down, pins us to the ground and we may sink beneath it — Or it could kindle a fire, an all consuming passion which drives us to do great things, tapping into hitherto unknown reserves of physical strength and mental ingenuity.
And in these moments of wonderment, the lightness of knowing that our existence on earth is ephemeral, and our actions do not move anything in the cosmos. This realization can be liberating. Its akin to Ukiyo — as the Japanese call it — literally meaning ‘floating world’ —living in the moment, detached from the bothers of life. And even this lightness can push us to ascend onto the palaces of our dreams, and yank out with a child like glee the ideas and things which we have been wanting to pursue forever, aglow in the knowledge that in our short time on earth, there are only so many tomorrows.
So what is desirable: Lightness or heaviness?
As Italo Clavino said in Invisible Cities “You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
And Iguazu, in the truest spirit, was a maddening delight.
