Wonder!

[Scene : in my head.
Two ladies having a conversation in shrill, excited voices.
1: What? She's back with the abstract again?
2: Umm, when did she even stop?]

This sense of wonder has so often served as my island of sanity when things have gone to shit. Wonder gets through when nothing else can.
It comes in unexpected places.

Like when you're pre-occupied with how you're just going to fail your paper or not reach on time or how the metro is so slow (well, Kolkata - this was back during college) and then you would see this really old person trying out the escalator for the first time. Scared yet excited, holding the railing strip. I still don't know if wonder is the right word, but it just feels happy. People's first time escalator trips always make me glad and sometimes make me question privileges.

When you're gasping for breath because the air is so polluted but there will be some dog around happily chasing it's tail or a girl asking you for a 'ticket' to enter your own lane. Also, red leaves lying about.

Wonder about how time passes and good things seem to come to you, wonder how you made it through the bad.
Wonder when you see someone upset and realize how many struggles you are yet to face and even then how you're so content and invincible in that moment.

Sometimes, it's as simple as walking down the road and having a thought about how this universe is way bigger than your story (but never feels that way). To be more precise, 7 billion stories as unique as fingerprints and tongue prints and DNA. Stories struggling to be heard, to merely exist. How DNA (all strands of all cells when put together would cover twice the diameter of the Solar System) fits into your body and how something so tiny can be so big at the same time so as to provide you identity.

On that same road, a labourer cycles a big cart filled above capacity with just..bottles! Plain, empty, plastic bottles. It's probably for recycling but there's just too many for them at once.
Assorted colourful toys being ferried about on scooters and lunas on a bridge above a river. Wonder where he's coming from and where he's going and if his life is as difficult as it looks. Blue and white boats dot the river below: on which you took rides and when you reached that bridge, you shouted just to hear your voice echo back. Strange place for an echo!

Wonder comes when you go to a library and think about the collective knowledge across centuries that books contain. How some of it was permanently lost to wars and basic human carelessness.
That you'll never read all of them. Even if you did, it wouldn't be half as fruitful if you didn't know how to read people.

Those parts of the world you'll never get to go.

That a wise old man is still a novice.

My all-time favourite - the sky that I keep referring to - how it looks blue but it isn't. That when we look at stars, we're standing in the present looking at history.

About people! How they manage to do what they do, be how they are. How some of them turn out to be so perfect and when (as it happens with most heroes) the illusions shatter, you wonder how they made it to your pedestal in the first place. The ones who still remain perfect after you know them? They're all that. Wonder that one day you might find yourself there.

Wonder about people who've gone to another place. If they still exist in any form or if they still think about you or if they would want to tell you something or if they would be proud of you or most importantly, if they're happy now. Funny to think about their pride.. when their boasting about you precisely because of their pride was such a source of embarrassment. I think it would still be cringey!

Wonder sounds naive and simplistic but it's one of the few fresh things we got.

Also, pretty sure I mixed up two different kinds of wonder in here.

[1: Was this a trick to go down the memory lane?
2: I wonder.
1: Is she making stupid jokes about herself, by herself?
2: .....]