Tracking Wonder
The Surprising Path to Purpose, Connection, and Fulfillment
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Summary
In a world that often feels devoid of magic, Jeffrey Davis presents a luminous exploration into the transformative power of wonder. Beyond the grind of daily routines and the hollow promises of material success lies a profound, untapped reservoir of creativity waiting to be unleashed. Davis, a revered thinker and storyteller, reveals how nurturing our innate sense of awe can revolutionize our perspective, allowing us to see beauty and possibility in the mundane. Through insightful anecdotes and actionable wisdom, "Tracking Wonder" becomes your guide to rediscovering the childlike marvel you once knew. Learn to navigate life's uncertainties with grace and resilience, cultivate deep connections, and transform confusion into curiosity. This book is not just an invitation to wonder but a blueprint for a more enriched, creative existence.
Introduction
Picture yourself on an ordinary Tuesday morning, rushing through your daily routine with the familiar weight of endless tasks pressing on your shoulders. The world around you has become a blur of notifications, deadlines, and the relentless pursuit of getting things done. Yet somewhere deep within, a quiet voice whispers that there must be more to life than this mechanical existence. This longing for something deeper, more meaningful, and genuinely alive is precisely what calls us back to our most fundamental human capacity: wonder. Wonder is not a luxury reserved for children or dreamers—it is the very essence of what makes us fully human. It's that moment when time stops as you witness a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, or when a stranger's kindness unexpectedly restores your faith in humanity. These experiences don't just make us feel good; they fundamentally rewire our brains, reset our perspectives, and reconnect us to what truly matters. In our productivity-obsessed culture, we've been taught to view such moments as distractions from our "real" work. But what if wonder itself is the most important work we can do? This exploration reveals how wonder operates through six distinct facets—openness, curiosity, bewilderment, hope, connection, and admiration—each offering a pathway back to authentic living. Through captivating stories of ordinary people who transformed their lives by embracing wonder, alongside cutting-edge research from psychology and neuroscience, you'll discover practical methods for cultivating these experiences in your daily life. The promise is profound: by learning to track and nurture wonder, you can break free from the exhausting cycle of productivity for its own sake and instead create a life rich with meaning, creativity, and genuine fulfillment.
From Flames to Wonder: A Personal Awakening
The summer that changed everything began with what seemed like a perfect dream. Jeffrey and his wife Hillary had just purchased their first home together—a beautiful 1850 farmhouse in New York's Hudson Valley that they lovingly called "The House of Great Strength." Jeffrey had his sunny study overlooking their own version of Walden Pond, complete with a meditation table and walls lined with twenty years of carefully collected books. Hillary tended her thriving garden while building her acupuncture practice. After years of uncertainty, they finally felt ready to build their life together, their businesses, and perhaps start a family. But dreams have a way of meeting reality in the most unexpected forms. That first summer brought two miscarriages, leaving Hillary and Jeffrey questioning whether they would ever have the family they desperately wanted. Then Jeffrey contracted Lyme disease, and the brutal antibiotics left him exhausted and brain-fogged for months. Just when it seemed things couldn't get worse, nature delivered the ultimate test. On a July afternoon, as they drove home from a local farm tour, an eerie purple storm rolled in without warning. Lightning bolts laddered from sky to earth in a spectacular but terrifying display. When they arrived home, four fire trucks surrounded their farmhouse. Lightning had struck the black walnut tree outside Jeffrey's study, traveled under the floor, found a faulty wire, and set the room ablaze. Twenty years of archives, three hundred beloved books, and a laptop containing all the files of his new business venture were reduced to ash and smoke. As Jeffrey stood in the charred remains of his study the next morning, surveying the holes knocked through walls and ceiling, he felt the weight of accumulated loss threatening to crush his spirit. Yet in that moment of deepest despair, something extraordinary happened. A yellow monarch butterfly slipped through one of the holes in the wall and landed on a smoke-blackened shelf. Its fuzzy torso was no bigger than a baby's finger, but it carried enormous wings etched like stained glass panels, waving back and forth in what looked like a gesture of prayer. For a fleeting moment, Jeffrey's fierce grip on holding himself together dissolved. A strange sense of opening swept through him, wide and free. Among the ruins of their simple dreams, this small winged visitor brought an inexplicable sense of hope. That moment of wonder, brief as it was, somehow conveyed a deep knowing that they would not only survive but eventually thrive. This encounter with the monarch became the catalyst for Jeffrey's deeper exploration into the power of wonder. He realized that wonder isn't just a pleasant distraction from life's difficulties—it's the very thing that can carry us through them and help us find meaning on the other side.
Opening Wide: The Six Facets of Wonder
When David Bowie appeared on Saturday Night Live in the late 1970s, thirteen-year-old Jeffrey was transfixed. Here was a grown man who could shape-shift through different identities with complete confidence, stuffing himself into a giant plastic tuxedo, then dressing as a Chinese stewardess, finally emerging as a marionette with remotely operated arms. Bowie brought fifteen hundred books with him when filming movies, reading everything from philosophy to animal behavior during breaks. He crossed gender boundaries, refused easy categorization, and seemed equally at home with punk icon Iggy Pop and Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor. For a teenager feeling trapped between his parents' conventional lifestyle and his own yearning for creative freedom, Bowie represented something revolutionary: the possibility that adult life could become an endless quest for creative reinvention. This wasn't just fascination Jeffrey felt—it was admiration, that specific form of wonder that occurs when we witness someone else's excellence and feel called to awaken our own potential. Years later, Jeffrey would discover that this experience contained all the essential elements of what he came to call "tracking wonder." Wonder, Jeffrey learned through extensive research and personal experimentation, operates through six distinct facets, each offering its own pathway to transformation. Openness creates the wide-sky space for new possibilities to emerge, allowing us to approach challenges with intelligent naivety rather than cynical resignation. Curiosity acts as the rebel facet, questioning conventional wisdom and driving us to discover new solutions to old problems. Bewilderment guides us through the deep woods of confusion and uncertainty, teaching us that getting lost is often the first step toward finding something better. Hope shines like a rainbow through our darkest storms, providing not mere wishful thinking but actionable vision for moving forward. Connection creates the flock energy that reminds us we're better together than apart, dissolving the barriers that separate us from meaningful relationships. Finally, admiration acts as a mirror, reflecting back to us our own potential for excellence while inspiring us to lift others up as well. Each facet works in concert with the others, creating a comprehensive approach to living that honors both our individual gifts and our interconnection with the world around us. When we learn to track these experiences consciously, we discover that wonder isn't something that happens to us randomly—it's something we can cultivate, nurture, and share with others, transforming not only our own lives but the lives of everyone we touch.
Standing Strong: Resilience Through Hope and Bewilderment
Tracy Fullerton had reached the pinnacle of success in the digital world by age thirty-seven. As founder and president of Spiderdance Inc., she was pioneering interactive television programming for MTV, NBC, and the History Channel—work that earned her an Emmy nomination and positioned her as a leader in the male-dominated tech industry. Her internet-based future looked brilliantly bright on the cusp of the new millennium. Then the dot-com bubble burst, taking her business and her carefully constructed identity with it. While her peers scrambled to find new jobs or numbed themselves with distractions, Fullerton made a different choice: she decided to feel the confusion rather than flee from it. Instead of immediately seeking another position, she took an extended break to reflect on where she had been and where she might go. This period of bewilderment—of being thoroughly lost in the deep woods of uncertainty—felt uncomfortable and disorienting, but Fullerton sensed it held important gifts. She traveled to Walden Pond, the place where Henry David Thoreau had conducted his famous experiment in deliberate living over a century earlier. As she wandered the woods and sat among the birds and birch trees, a seemingly impossible idea began to emerge: What if she could create video games that countered the typical adrenaline-producing scenarios with adventures that instilled meaning, contemplation, and wonder? What if she could create a video game based on Thoreau's own questioning of our reliance on technology? This audacious vision would take over a decade to realize. Fullerton had no money and no prospect of funding because, as she put it, "you can't pitch this idea" to traditional gaming investors. She started a book club with interested team members, reading Walden together and discussing which passages spoke personally to each of them. Five years later, they landed their first grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which led to further funding and eventually to a fully realized video game that teaches players about transcendentalism while they experience the contemplative pace of Thoreau's daily life. The game requires players to gather wood, fish in the pond, maintain Thoreau's cabin, and tend a garden while learning about his role in the Underground Railroad and his advanced studies of herbalism. When the avatar becomes exhausted from hard driving, the world goes gray and loses "inspiration," which can only be regained by finding wonder in the surrounding woods. Fullerton's story illustrates how the seemingly negative experience of bewilderment can become a gateway to breakthrough innovation. By learning to "fertilize confusion" rather than flee from it, she transformed a career setback into the foundation for groundbreaking creative work that continues to impact thousands of players worldwide.
Creating Connection: Wonder as a Gift to Others
The COVID-19 pandemic had trapped fourteen-year-old Parker in his bedroom for weeks, and his parents Hollye and Troy watched helplessly as their son sank deeper into depression. The family had planned to spend spring break in New York City, seeing Broadway shows and experiencing the energy of the big city, but now they were confined to their Los Angeles home with no end to the isolation in sight. Instead of accepting defeat, Hollye and Troy decided to bring New York to their living room. "Don't come out of your room until dinner," they told Parker, then spent the entire day transforming their home into Times Square. They dug through their basement for supplies to upcycle into skyscrapers and landmarks, created a playlist of New York songs, and even ordered Domino's pizza but replaced the label with one from a famous Manhattan pizzeria. When Parker emerged from his room that evening, his sullen expression instantly transformed into wonder. He couldn't believe what his parents had accomplished. That single destination dinner not only lifted his spirits but sparked a question that would sustain their family through the entire pandemic: "Okay, where are we going tomorrow night?" This simple act of creative generosity launched the family on a journey to over forty destination dinners, each one requiring days of preparation as they crafted props, special menus, and activities based on locations like Japan, India, Africa, and even outer space. Their rule was that everything had to be created from materials they had lying around the house. Hollye found herself spending hours crafting a didgeridoo for their Australia night, knowing it would only be used once, but discovering that the process brought her as much joy as it brought her family. What began as a desperate attempt to help their son became a source of healing for the entire family. The destination dinners didn't just pass time during lockdown—they created a ritual of anticipation, creativity, and connection that gave each family member something meaningful to contribute. Parker's depression lifted as he became an active participant in planning each adventure, while Hollye and Troy rediscovered the joy of creating wonder for someone they loved. This story reveals one of wonder's most powerful secrets: it multiplies when shared. The family's commitment to gifting wonder to one another created a positive feedback loop that sustained them through one of the most challenging periods in recent history. By learning to see their son not as a problem to be solved but as someone worthy of extraordinary experiences, they transformed their home into a laboratory for connection and their family into a testament to the power of creative love.
Summary
The journey back to wonder begins with a simple but radical recognition: we are not machines designed for endless productivity, but human beings with an innate capacity for awe, curiosity, and deep connection. The stories throughout this exploration reveal that wonder is not a luxury we indulge when our work is done, but the very foundation that makes meaningful work possible. When lightning struck that farmhouse and a yellow monarch butterfly appeared among the ruins, it wasn't just a moment of beauty—it was a reminder that resilience and renewal often arrive in the most unexpected forms. The six facets of wonder offer us a comprehensive toolkit for reclaiming our birthright to live with meaning and possibility. Through openness, we learn to approach challenges with fresh eyes rather than cynical resignation. Curiosity drives us to question assumptions and discover new solutions. Bewilderment teaches us that getting lost is often the first step toward finding something better. Hope provides not wishful thinking but actionable vision for moving forward. Connection reminds us we're stronger together than apart. And admiration reflects back our own potential while inspiring us to lift others up as well. Perhaps most importantly, these stories demonstrate that wonder is contagious. When we learn to track and cultivate wonder in our own lives, we naturally begin to create experiences that spark wonder in others. Whether it's a family transforming their living room into Times Square or an entrepreneur building a company based on idealism rather than mere profit, the ripple effects of wonder extend far beyond our individual lives. In a world that often feels fragmented and rushed, choosing wonder becomes an act of rebellion—a declaration that meaning, beauty, and authentic connection are not only possible but essential for human flourishing.
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By Jeffrey Davis
