For me, wonder is to creativity as oxygen is to life

If I'm not able to access wonder, my creativity feels stunted. There are many small ways I've found to feel wonder in my day to day life, and it starts with getting off my computer — but the most powerful way to do that has been leaving my house, or better yet, leaving town.

Every time I leave town and extract myself from the mental clutter of daily life, I'm reacquainted with a part of myself that comes alive through being more present and noticing simple things. As I arrive back home, the feeling lingers, but never long enough, which is part of why I keep chasing it.

I just got back after two weeks away — ten days in the UK and four days in South Carolina — and both places gave me that feeling in very different registers.

In England, the wonder was layered, sometimes arriving from nature and sometimes from the artisanal wonders of what human hands can make.

I went on long walks, gave many piggyback rides to my niece and nephews, marveled at a coming storm in Hyde Park, and visited my favorite stationery and fabric shops. I admired English perennial borders, and saw some incredible exhibitions: Wes Anderson! Schiaparelli! David Hockney! It was especially poignant to see Hockney's work, given that he died a week later.

But it was the smaller things that stayed with me too— giant poppies, crooked pub ceilings, bolts of Indian cotton, cherry curd (I'm forever changed), underground maps, impossibly perfect green walls. How do they do green so flawlessly? I devoured clotted cream and admired beech trees, and my laptop was barely opened.

South Carolina was a different kind of wonder — slower, wilder, closer to the ground. There were long walks, lots of swimming, birdwatching, and even more reading. But mostly, it was also a string of small encounters that left me in wonder: alligator eyes peeking above a pond, Spanish moss swaying in the breeze, snakeskin in the grass, juvenile eagles feeding on fish, a mysterious animal skeleton, armadillos, an owl swooping away from its prey on the forest floor.

I came back exhausted but refreshed — amazed, as always, at how spacious my brain feels with some distance from screens.

These sentiments are not novel or new, but they're trite for a reason. Travel isn't always accessible, nor does it solve life's problems entirely, but I hope this can be a reminder to my future self to step out of my daily pathways from time to time, and wonder.

It makes me think of a quote I love from the incredible graphic novelist Chris Ware. In the epigraph of Building Stories, he quotes his grandmother:

"Don't forget to go out of the house every once in a while or you'll lose your source of pollination."