I’m underwater, diving up with seaweed between my fingers. The water is cold, salty and tinged with tiny specks of cyanobacteria. At this point I’m not aware of this, thinking the little specks of colour may be pollen from the nearby shoreline. I love the sea, the wonder of it all, the great big space that makes me feel absolutely tiny in comparison.

I’ve been swimming in the sea everyday for days on end now, I’ve forgotten my to-do-lists, my phone is broken and my thoughts have finally dissolved into the ocean, along with all my energy and exhaustion. I was going to keep up writing on holiday, but swirling my body through the ocean this morning (that looks like someone has left the tea bags in for a tad too long, thousands of bits of tiny algae turning it into a darker shade of greenbrown that the light can only quite get through) allowed me to let go of it all. For a whole month. 

In the middle of my trip, a question popped up in my near empty brain, next to snippets of the current status quo (the political conundrums in Germany that I talked about with new friends from Dresden over a campsite dinner, the flames of wildfires near Bordeaux that I learned about from the screen in the Danish public transport, the caramel-coloured swirls of cyanobacteria in the Baltic Sea, that we naively thought were sandbanks from afar) How to be alive in all of this? Like really alive? Instead of being sucked into the chaos of everything outside of my control, how can I learn to embrace life PROPERLY despite it all?

How can we, as adults, go back to the state my kids manage to hold on to for hours, playing in the sand, adding water, popping seaweed, collecting shells, saving jellyfish…? They are spending their time for time’s sake. In comparison, I’m not doing a good job at being alive.

Looking for someone who has already answered this question, I bumped into Maria Popova online. In her article How to be More Alive Maria makes the case for wonder. Quoting Hermann Hesse and Walt Whitman she claims: “what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten by reality.”

A friend of mine told me on a phone call a few weeks back, that she has now seen the ocean so often online, that when she stands in front of it she no longer feels the thrill of it. Same with my surroundings most days. I walk past the dandelions, without helping it’s parachutes disperse, I’ve stopped visiting friends unannounced, I run for sport not for fun.

If two men took wonder seriously back then, why have most adults forgotten how it works? Maria enclosed Hermann’s explanation from the book Butterflies: Reflections, Tales, and Verse because apparently we grown ups were also doing a bad job with wonder back then.

Hermann writes: “Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.”

Sounds familiar. Yup, this sums up my schooling despite the decades in between me and him. And AI is exacerbating our culture's tendency to avoid wonder, because it’s built purely on the opposite. Logic.

But you and I still feel it, don’t we? When we slow down.

Wonder, on purpose.

Me and my friend Sarah have been friends for nearly a decade now and we are the kind of friends that keep on arguing about the state of things until late into the night. Somewhere in one of those we-know-we-need-to-go-to-bed-now conversations, tired of feeling like shit about everything we can't control, one of us said it almost as a joke: maybe the resistance is just noticing. Actually looking at things. Not the doom, not whatever the algorithm decided we should be afraid of today, but the actual world, which is still, despite everything, completely and unbelievably beautiful. 

We decided to do something about this. We’ve been in limbo for years now, and we both feel a real need for a global pause button. We’ve been waiting for someone to come along and say “Here's your Earl Grey and a slice of coffee cake. You just sit here. Forget „the world“. How about a game of backgammon?”

Of course forgetting the world is nonsense, because, yes wait a minute, the world is exactly what we need right now. But offline, the real stuff, algae popping between our fingertips, the twitch of a stinging nettle, the smell of soup warming and the bright orange annoying spatters it makes on the surface you just cleaned, the near silent noise of a bat at night flying through the city’s stark illumination.

So this is us asking you to take a break. A real one.

No holiday, no mindfulness techniques, no protein powder. Instead we adjust the lenses we’ve been using to look at the world. It may feel a bit clumsy at first, but it’s actually very punk of you not to be exhausted by the chaos out there. Which is why yesterday we launched a habit. WONDER AS RESISTANCE as snail mail. We’re all in on making wonder our everyday and we chose paper because that’s how we make sense of the world. And yes, stamps is an added bonus.

So this is us, rewilding our brains with wonder.

Written by a human. Unpolished. On purpose.