My friend Kelly Beal’s Instagram will treat you to a simple quote each day. There are many I have bookmarked, but this particular one stopped me cold.
I haven’t stopped thinking about this deficit of wonder and how we might replenish it.
I’ve become more mindful of the many times that our family reaches for our phones to look up a question that arises.
Did Princess Bride come out before or after The Breakfast Club?
What area did Hannibal conquer?
What’s that Italian restaurant called again, the one with the bug-shaped pasta?
Who is the voiceover on those ads? It’s been driving me crazy!
I’ve realized how much I’ve missed all that wondering we used to take for granted. The brainstorming. The debating. The building on each other’s ideas. The yes, and…ing.
Even the laughter and the teasing when one of us gets something egregiously wrong.
(That would usually be me, by the way. I should never challenge Jon on the name of a film score composer. And for the life of me, I will never remember whether it’s Margot Rob-bee or Robe-ee, as the kids will remind me with great joy.)
So we’ve been working on the habit of putting down the Google machines welded to our hands and just discussing an idea instead of immediately looking up answers.
In creative fields, we learn that we need to give our brains time to work on a problem. We think about it like crazy, we do some research, we jot down every initial thought in our heads. Then, when our cerebral matter is good and saturated, we make ourselves walk away. Just stop and do literally anything else.
You’ll find your mind will keep working on the problem, even and especially when you don’t tell it to.
That’s why I have always slept with a pen next to my bed. That’s why I often have my best, freshest ideas first thing in the morning. That’s why (well, among other reasons) I think weaning ourselves off a 24/7 news cycle is so important.
We need to slow down.
We need to trade reacting for responding.
We need to make room for wondering.
I think that’s part of what is so special about all the excellent series we’re watching right now: Severance. White Lotus. Coming soon, The Last of Us and, apparently, a new season of Ted Lasso. (Yay!)
These also happen to be the shows that roll out once a week.
Part of the fun has been the thinking, the theorizing, the speculating, and all the mystery. Living with these wonderfully complex characters, getting to know them a little more each week. Talking to friends about what we think might be happening and debating our hypotheses, knowing that none of us has any more information than anyone else.
Then, waiting an entire seven days to see what we got right and what we got wrong.
A few people have told me they prefer to wait until all the shows are available so they can tear through them in a few days without the wait.
The wait isn’t frustrating to me; it’s kind of a delicious anticipation.
It gives my brain time to work through the problems, and that gives me a satisfaction I don’t get when I’m able to just Google all the answers.
I also happen to love communities that form around (increasingly rare) shared cultural experiences. They offer new pathways for connection and community as our theorizing and speculating move beyond our living room couch. I’m talking about Severance with my physical therapist. The woman on the treatment table next to me joins in. A stranger on the subway asks me about it. My kids’ friends’ parents and I now need a second cup of coffee to keep discussing.
I love it so much.
Maybe because it’s a kind of low-stakes, high-enough-reward community, these series fandoms. But isn’t community the powerful force and restorative antidote to loneliness that so many of us have been seeking out lately? It seems like all the wonderful Substacks I read have touched on the importance of community in some way or another recently.
This counts.
Trading some of my binge-watching and instantaneous trivia-checking to create moments of connection and replenishment of wonder: That sounds so great to me right now.
So great.
I don’t think I need anything and everything all of the time.
Liz Gumbinner is a Brooklyn-based writer, award-winning ad agency creative director, and OG mom blogger who was called “funny some of the time” by an enthusiastic anonymous commenter. This was originally posted on her Substack “I’m Walking Here!,” where she covers culture, media, politics, and parenting.
Header image by Annie Spratt for Unsplash+.