’Tis the season—that peculiar time of year when nostalgia comes uninvited, but as welcome as any long-lost friend. The air itself seems heavier, laden with memory. We unbox our traditions, wiping away a year’s worth of dust. We handle them carefully—as if they might break, or worse, disappear if we don’t honor them properly.
Each year we return—not just to places, but to the beta versions of our adult selves. Children who believed without effort. Who felt without fear. Who stood wide-eyed before the world, not yet spoiled by the disappointments of reality.
The Nature of Wonder
This is the wonderment—the superpower we once possessed, now something we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying—quietly, sometimes desperately—to reclaim.
I’ve thought often about this. About wonderment. About where it comes from. What feeds it? What starves it? And finally—what extinguishes it altogether?
Because wonder doesn’t vanish all at once. It doesn’t die loudly. It doesn’t announce its departure. It fades—softly, incrementally—like something too tired to carry on. And maybe the cruelest truth of all is that wonder doesn’t leave us—we stop recognizing it when it arrives.
The Myth of the Gift
As children, we were told a story. A convenient one. That magic came from the gift—inside the box, the wrapping paper, the bow. But that was never true.
The excitement was never about what was inside the package. It was about what could be. Potential. Pure, unfiltered potential.
In the days—no, the weeks—leading up to that morning, every unopened box became a universe of possibility. The future. Infinite adventures, fueled by imagination, wrapped within cardboard and tape.
Lego. Barbie. An Atari 2600 video computer system with a dozen cool cartridges—even the much-maligned E.T. game. Each present didn’t just promise something—it promised everything. With every gift unwrapped, the horizon expanded. Possibility stacked upon possibility until the unopened gift itself took on mythical power. Not because of what it was—but because of what it represented.
Hope. Belief. The radical idea that something wonderful might be waiting for us simply because it could.
The Loss of Wonder
But somewhere along the way, we strayed too far afield. Adolescence arrived—with its inescapable bluntness and quiet cruelty. It taught us that anticipation is a liability. That caring openly is a weakness. That disappointment hurts less if you never let yourself dream.
Cynicism replaced wonderment. So we adapted. We learned restraint. We learned skepticism. We learned the practiced shrug of someone who pretends not to care while caring deeply.
It became uncool to be excited. Embarrassing to hope too loudly. Naive to believe without evidence. Paired with the intoxicating promise of adult freedom—control, independence, certainty—the flame of wonderment dimmed. Not because it failed us, but because we decided we no longer needed it.
We built defenses. Battlements of irony. Walls of lowered expectations and preemptive disappointment. Because if you don’t expect much, you can’t lose much. Or so we told ourselves.
Reclaiming Wonder
So now what? Can wonderment be relearned? Or is it a secret language only known in childhood, forever lost to us, once our fluency fades?
I don’t think so. I think wonder is patient. I think it waits. It lingers in the margins. In quiet moments. In the spaces we rush past because we’re too busy being adults to notice them.
Reconnecting with it takes effort now. Conscious effort. The kind that, as children, we never needed. It means letting ourselves feel anticipation again without demanding guarantees. Letting possibility exist—no questions asked, no strings attached. It means standing in front of an unopened moment and resisting the urge to raise our shields.
Maybe wonder doesn’t require new magic at all—just vulnerability. One small moment of innocence is enough to spark it again. To let it glow—tentatively at first, then brighter. Not as it once was—because nothing ever is—but as something new and glorious.
The warm blanket of childhood wonderment now becomes our armor against the biting cold of cynicism.
You see, we never really outgrow wonderment; we only fail to practice it.
Mannino Acid 