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Restoring Your Sense Of Wonder*
Step away from the keyboard. 
Not now, but in a moment, after you’ve finished reading this.
Pretend I’m right there next to you and like any good friend, I’m gently urging you to do something different.
I want to dare you to unhook yourself from your common thought and challenge you to the unusual. Something specifically unusual.
This unusual thing will take you beyond the limited boundaries of yourself and fling your awareness into the “hugeness of the universe.”
Let’s go outside for a moment. I’ve got something to show you.
Tonight we’re going to wrap our minds around something it cannot grasp.
“My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe,” said Einstein. To feel what Einstein felt, to get in front of that wonderment and grasp what he was trying to convey . . . just step outside on a clear night.
Maybe that night is tonight. Maybe it will be another night — but do it.
Today, this article from award-winning novelist Anthony Doerr gives us a movement to pause and reflect in the headlong rush of the Christmas season.
Below is my favorite clip from his stirring article, as always feel free to click the link to read the entire piece — worth your time, I promise you.
“The night sky is the coolest Advent calendar imaginable: it is composed of an infinite number of doors. Open one and find ten thousand galaxies hiding behind it, streaming away at hundreds of miles per second. Open another, and another. You gaze up into history; you stare into the limits of your own understanding. The past flies toward you at the speed of light. Why are you here? Why are the stars there? Is it even remotely possible that our one, tiny, eggshell world is the only one encrusted with life?
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field image should be in every classroom in the world. It should be on the president’s desk. It should probably be in every church, too. “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced,” Einstein once said, “there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.”
Whatever we believe in - God, children, nationhood - nothing can be more important than to take a moment every now and then and accept the invitation of the sky: to leave the confines of ourselves and fly off into the hugeness of the universe, to disappear into the inexplicable, the implacable, the reflection of that something our minds cannot grasp.”
Window of Possibility: Why the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is the most incredible photograph ever taken
And to keep myself reminded to “to disappear into the inexplicable and the implacable,” I have the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image as the wallpaper on my desktop. Want to know something weird? Every since I was a kid, long before the Hubble Ultra Deep Field pictures, I’ve had reoccurring dreams where the night sky was so chock-full of galaxies, I could hardly see the stars.
The Deep Field image was the first time I realized that it wasn’t some fantastical dream image, that view actually existed in real life and science, bless it’s heart, proved it.
Closing off this Heisenberg Friday with something that make you go . . . hmmmm.
* = About Heisenberg Fridays. Each Friday I post about whatever I want outside of the realms of marketing, sales, advertising or copywriting. More often than not, it will be about one of my favorite studies – the research into quantum mechanics and how consciousness influences reality.
So while most of the week you’ll be certain of the overall theme of my posts, each Friday you will experience uncertainty about the topic, which is my tip of the hat to Werner Heisenberg the creator of quantum mechanics’ Uncertainty Principle.
Technorati tags: Anthony Doerr, Einstein, Heisenberg Fridays, Hubble Ultra Deep Field, sense of wonder, copywriter, marketing strategist, provocateur, ROI Copywriting, Walter Terry
By Walter |
Topics: Heisenberg Fridays |