It was a harsh cold winter in Pittsburgh, 2008. My eldest was just born, and both of us had just about enough of staying home, but with a wind chill as cold as -20°C degrees, there was not much we could do.
So every weekend, I would wrap her tiny body with lots of layers, put her in her favorite baby carrier, and like two snuggling kangaroos we would walk down to the Carnegie Museum of Art.
I have to confess that I have never visited a museum as often and as thoroughly as I did during that winter. There wasn’t a single exhibition that I skipped or a guided tour that I missed. It only took the guards once or twice before they started waiving us in without presenting our membership pass (I guess I was the only crazy dad they knew carrying a baby inside his coat during these insane snowstorms).
One of my favorite exhibitions in the museum was called “I Wish Your Wish”. It was a perforated wall, with strips of cotton ribbons coming out of each hole, each ribbon holding a wish in many different languages. Visitors were urged to select and take home a ribbon with their most coveted wish. The creator, a Brazilian artist (Rivane Neuenschwander), also placed a small table with pen and paper and encouraged visitors to add their own wishes and insert them into the vacant holes, de facto creating a technicolor Wailing Wall. She later collected these suggestions and updated the current list of wishes throughout the exhibition.
I recall visiting this exhibition every week, reading and re-reading the ribbons. Sometimes adding my own wishes but mostly asking myself: “What is it that we humans really deeply wish for?”, as for me, these constantly changing ribbons were tracking people’s wishes at different times and places around the world, just like a wish seismograph.
At some point, I ended up choosing one of the ribbons, and following the Brazilian popular belief, I tied it firmly three times across my wrist. The Brazilians believe that doing so will grant you your wish, but only when the ribbon is so weak that it tears and falls off on its own accord.
Which ribbon did I choose? was my wish granted? that is a story for a different post.. but one of my all-time favorite ribbons that kept on calling on me to be plucked from the wall was this one:
“To find pleasure in things as much as I used to as a child”
Going back to the Simple Wonders
For me, this last year of confinement is an invitation to stop and go back to finding pleasure in things as much as we used to as a child, these simple, magical moments: my children growing, nature, raindrops, the smell of wet grass, wind, cloud, silence, becoming aware of the simple wonders.
“Wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup:
The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why,
but we are all like that.”
– From: “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”, by Robert Fulghum
This week, I invite you to stop,
breathe, take it in, and ask yourselves:
Isn’t it time we start noticing our simple wonders?
Feel free to share your simple wonders here below, and see you all next week
