Clay’s Court: Chasing childlike wonder

You lose a lot of things as you move away from childhood and towards adulthood.

Friends, favorite toys, music, memories and TV shows. Eventually the list gets so lengthy that you stop remembering what you lost and only vaguely remember that things have changed since you were a kid (at least that’s how it is for me).

We’ve all lost a lot of things, but the most important thing we lost growing up is wonder.

The definition of wonder is “A feeling of great surprise and pleasure that you have, for example when you see something that is very beautiful, or when something happens that you thought was impossible.”

The specific type of wonder I’m talking about today, though, is childlike wonder.

Childlike wonder is wonder, but through the lens of someone who has no real sense of what is true and possible. Think of a toddler who’s amazed by the most mundane of things.

That being said, I want to talk about the time I took my fiancé to the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta last year.

Both of us grew up in south Georgia, so a trip to Atlanta was at the very least going to be four hours. You can swing that drive in one day if you really want to, but most people would opt for a hotel to ease the burden.

Growing up we couldn’t afford Atlanta hotel prices, though. So I only went maybe once until I was an adult, and though she made several trips in her teens (her father worked for Coca-Cola) she never went to the Georgia Aquarium.

She’s always had a thing for ocean animals (and animals in general), and it was a childhood dream of hers to visit a real aquarium.

With us moving to middle Georgia, which is two hours from everywhere, I figured we’d make the trip up to Atlanta.

I take an annual trip for the Atlanta Hawks’ opening night anyways, so last October we booked a hotel and the aquarium tickets and made a weekend out of it.

Leading up to it she was the most excited I’ve seen her about anything.

She was robbed of most of her childhood, and never got to experience much wonder. So seeing her walk through the gates at the aquarium for the first time was very rewarding.

From the moment we walked through the gates into the concourse she had this look of awe on her face. She looked back and forth at all the exhibit entrances and then back at me with a face lit up with so much joy.

She had a fear of sharks (which she’d mostly gotten over by the time we went), so the fact that even as we walked through the shark exhibit she had a look of childlike wonder made me realize how special this was to her.

I didn’t see a 20-something-year-old woman walking through the aquarium, but a little girl experiencing something she’d been yearning for for the first time.

We sat in front of the big aquarium window for who knows how long, but she was glued to the display the whole time tracking the whale shark and other fish.

To this day it’s my most fond memory together, it even trumps our engagement.

You don’t often get to see your partner experience something like childlike wonder. Even though the reason she’s able to now is a negative one, I’m thankful I was able to help her do that and be there to witness it.

It won’t always be something simple like it was in my case, but help your partner or someone in your life experience childlike wonder.

It’s easy for life to drag you down. Sometimes you just need to be a little girl going through the aquarium for the first time.