My two-year-old boy says something quite regularly that never fails to make me smile like a goon. He say, 'Wow'. And he says it in the way it was originally intended - he is expressing pure amazement at something so surprising that no other word will do. He is wonderfully undiscerning with his Wows; a bowl of strawberries gets the same 'Wow' as when he entered Salisbury Cathedral. I find myself wanting to show him new places (and new bowls of fruit) just to watch those little eyebrows lift and the little mouth fall open for the wonderful word to escape.
It has got me thinking about the notion of surprise. A friend recently wrote to me saying she needed 'something irregular and extra-ordinary to happen to [her]'. Like so many of my friends, she (and I) are blessed with a riotously colourful back catalogue of memories - mostly filed into travel, relationships, life-changing connections with strangers on trains and coming-of-age revelations sat on our backpacks next to waterfalls. We took our 'Wow' moments utterly for granted when we knew there was always another one on its way.
There are numerous reasons why surprises become fewer once you 'settle down' and do the family thing. One is that routine has to inevitably set in for family life to function. Another is that you are so damn busy living in the past or the future that you forget to allow the moments of wonder to slow your pace and change your direction. A slightly more worrying reason struck me when flicking through my older son's 'Boys' Handbook'. It was a Baden-Powell-ism: "A scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens".
Obviously, in a cub scout context, this is understandable but the bare message chilled my bones. Are we trying to make our lives so comfortable, protected and controlled that we are denying ourselves access to surprise? I recently read an article encouraging parents to involve their children when selecting their own reading choices in the library; the idea being that our children would see us as readers too and learn about good habits in selecting new books.
This is all very well-meaning. However I will never forget the moment my mum asked me, aged eleven, whether I wanted to take a look at some of the books in the older section of our library in Brighton. Her suggestion completely baffled me because for the eleven years she had been bringing me to the library, she had deposited me with the colourful book boxes and pillows of the children's section and she had disappeared into the dark, dusty, quite frankly boring aisles of adult books. In that moment of confusion I realised that I had genuinely (no joke..) thought adult books were written in a different language. Where I got that idea from I have no idea but as I crossed into the young adult shelves and saw they had titles I could understand and pages of new stories in English, I was blown away. A true, if slightly unusual, Wow moment. If my mum had followed this article's advice, I would never have had that revelatory moment that, even now, makes my heart race.
So, how to allow the surprises back in while we're also trying to reduce risk, plan meticulously and live intentionally. Surprise, by its very definition, cannot be looked for. We need to clear the space in our lives and tune into the two-year-old we all have buried within us. Prepare to be amazed by something that could simply annoy us if we close our minds to it.
Just this week, while settling down for my blissful half hour of peaceful reading while my son had his guitar lesson, another parent came to invade my quiet. He picked up a guitar from the deserted shop floor, emptied his pockets onto the table then settled himself on the sofa adjoining mine. Bad-naturedly, my irritation levels rose at this unexpected intrusion. However, he then started to play a gentle, beautiful piece, lost in his own bliss. We were two strangers sat in an empty guitar shop, both indulging our own passions for a moment. As it turned out, a Wow moment.
