The practice of active wondering
Or: outside lies...a magical telephone pole?
I loathe April Fool’s Day on the internet. Which, come to think of it, might mean I actually adore it, because my fervent desire to avoid all the haha hilarious pranks makes it easy to avoid social media feeds for the entire day—catapulting me back to my pre-April 1995 existence, before I slid that AOL disk into my Mac for the very first time.
Of course I love the digital age’s easy access to information—but we all know it’s superhighway studded with perils. A meme popular with the Gen X crowd is how we grew up firmly believing that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be. But I think the quicksand peril did actually turn out to be as common and as dangerous as we feared—it’s just that it’s metaphorical. Life on the internet means threading our way through a landscape full of hidden pits that want to suck us in.
Personally, I’m most susceptible to the lovely ones, the quicksand perils posed by new interests and hobbies and art supplies and booklists. Or the puzzle-solving kind—those are the ones that suck me in so quickly I hardly notice it happening. Is that video real or AI? What Broadway star is everyone subtweeting about? What on earth is the hydration ration of that unbelievably bubbly and active levain in that Tiktok someone posted on r/oddlysatisfying?1
Maybe that’s why yesterday Monday2, April Fool’s Day, felt so refreshing. Since I don’t enjoy prank posts, I spent very little time online, wandering through the quicksand landscape. Instead, I:
spent longer than usual reading through quotes and passages I’ve saved in Readwise;
found a nice protected-but-warm spot for our mason bee house;
listened to several chapters of Wolf Hall while meandering around the yard deciding where to plant what; and
best of all, I spent a good twenty minutes staring at the utility pole on our corner with Huck and Rilla.
Let me explain. Last week I began reading them one of my favorite nonfiction books: Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places by John Stilgoe.3 I first read it 2008 and did a lot of writing at the time about how enchanting I found it. This book had me caring about things like telephone poles and sewer grates. As a longtime homeschooler, I have a well developed appreciation for the web of connections between topics, concepts, events, experiences, individuals—a sense of wonder at the way “way leads on to way,” as Robert Frost put it, and as I wrote about during my first encounter with Stilgoe’s book:
“Way leads on to way,” of course, is a quote from “The Road Less Traveled.” But unlike Frost’s traveller, who, “knowing how way leads on to way,” doubts life will ever bring him back to this crossroads in the wood where he has chosen to take the less traveled path, the paths unfolding before our connections can and will be revisited and explored endlessly, in different ways, all through our lives. And like the paths in the wood, where wind and light and leaves and wildlife are always altering the landscape so that the path changes from hour to hour, our mental landmarks are changed and built upon and nuanced every time we revisit them.
Or it’s like this: instead of an endlessly forking road, the world is a vast spiderweb. Put a foot upon one strand and you’ll set others trembling all around you. You can get anywhere from anywhere.
Which is how my teens and I found ourselves on the corner on a weekday morning, asking questions about a telephone pole.
Stilgoe begins his book with an exploration of power lines, phone lines, and the poles on which they’re strung across the country.
“Nothing screams more loudly of the still-developing-nation status of the United States [when electricity came along] than the creosote-treated poles, all slightly out of perpendicular, marching along almost every road as they once marched across the plains in the hoofprints of the Pony Express. Other nations, at least in cities and suburbs, preferred steel pylons from the start, or snaked their cables underground in conduits, safe from lightning strikes, snowstorms, falling tree limbs, even errant motorists, and even now in Japan, Germany, and elsewhere, rural families expect that someday overhead wires will disappear beneath road surfaces. But not so in the United States, land of cheap timber, vast distances, and an easygoing willingness to accept the poles that warp and twist and finally rot.”
Suddenly, as Stilgoe explores the history of utility poles, these objects whose ubiquity has rendered them all but invisible are standing in a spotlight, the stars of our morning. With a bit of their history in mind (and much more to come as we, later, continued making our way through the chapter), we had context for the pole, and it had become not only visible but fascinating.
It wears several badges and plaques, all stamped with numbers: its own unique identification number, several dated inspection markers, and even its address—a number that corresponds to the house numbers running north and south along our block. It is absolutely covered with staples—hundreds of them, presumably from decades of lost-cat and garage-sale flyers. Our particular corner gets a lot of pedestrian traffic. Another pole in the middle of the block wears hardly any staples at all.
The longer we looked, the more we noticed, and the more questions we had. Later that day, in a Brave Writer Podcast conversation with Julie Bogart4, I mentioned that such moments always remind me of Meindert de Jong’s beautiful middle-grade novel The Wheel on the School. Five young schoolchildren ask their teacher why storks don’t nest in their village each spring the way they did in their elders’ stories of long ago. The teacher sends them outside to wonder about it—wonder as a lively action verb, a deliberate activity. As the novel unfolds, each child ponders the question from a slightly different perspective, and through conversation and observation, they eventually unravel the mystery.
It’s a gorgeous book (sadly out of print now, but findable)5, and even more gorgeous is the practice of active wondering. It’s what unites scientists, poets, artists, and toddlers.
“Learning to look around,” writes Stilgoe,
“sparks curiosity, encourages serendipity. Amazing connections get made that way; questions are raised—and sometimes answered—that never would be otherwise. Any explorer sees things that reward not just a bit of scrutiny but a bit of thought, sometimes a lot of thought over years. Put the things in spatial context or arrange them in time, and they acquire value immediately.”
What I love in that view—and by extension, in his book—is that the process begins with the senses. First, we look or listen or touch. Then we begin to wonder. We hang bits of information onto other bits. We make connections. We begin to see context. We ask new questions.
I know it wasn’t an accident that a day away from the feeds presented me (us!) with a rich array of delights to wonder about. Online, it’s easy to encounter answers and opinions, but often our questions—wonderings—get lost in the rush of information and images, even if a question was what prompted us to open the tab in the first place.
The children in The Wheel on the School do eventually arrive at an answer to the question that sparks their adventure—but the answer, the plain fact of it, isn’t the important thing. It’s their question that matters: this puzzle that sends them out into their little world to notice, and wonder, and talk to people, and poke around, and stumble into conversations and personal connections, and ask yet more questions. If the teacher had given them a quick answer, they’d probably have forgotten all about the storks by recess.
I’m very much in the habit of saying, “I don’t know, let’s look it up!”—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a privilege of the digital age. But I appreciate the telephone-pole reminder that there is immense value in sitting with questions for a while—and more than that, allowing enough mental stillness for questions to arise in the first place. Taking a long, close look at a manhole cover, a fountain pen, a shoelace, a sword-wielding rabbit in a medieval manuscript. Wondering with all our might.
Took me longer than expected to finish writing this. I had telephone-pole staples to count!
Outside Lies Magic doesn’t seem to be listed at Bookshop.org, so here’s an Amazon (affiliate) link.
It’ll be the April 17 episode, if you’re interested.
It won the Newbery in 1955! And yet (heavy sigh, publishing is a harsh mistress) it is out of print. Lots of used copies still floating around, though.
Wolf Hall on audio sounds delicious!
Beautiful. Resonates with something a historian was saying recently about curiosity being the driving force behind e if academic history and justification in itself.