Perell asks Macfarlane about the connection-to-nature his son sees instantly and most adults lose. Macfarlane answers: Wonder is an essential survival skill.1
Not a sentimental claim. An operational one. Wonder is jaw-dropped. It's the moment where you are just stepped back by the world's, by the miracle of the world and the freely given miracle of the world.1 The rainbow at the window. You stop everything you were doing. Every time. Every time.
Macfarlane calls rainbows the charismatic megafauna of wonder. They do wonder often and well. And the other thing about a rainbow: it's utterly bespoke. It was your, it was David's rainbow. It was no one else's rainbow in the way it appeared to you because it's a prismatic function that the water is lensing light and separating light into its constituent wavelengths.1 If you'd stepped a yard to the right, you'd have seen a different rainbow. Wonder is personal at the level of physics.
The framing is strong: survival skill, not aesthetic enrichment or spiritual practice. What is wonder helping you survive?
Macfarlane doesn't argue the case explicitly, but the surrounding conversation makes it clear. The blinders of rationalism are real. The rational mind, properly developed, treats the world as inventory — what's there, what it's for, what to do with it. The rational mind is necessary but partial. The world it constructs is functional and impoverished.
Wonder reactivates the part of perception that the rational inventory shuts down. The same rainbow that the rational mind processes as atmospheric water + sunlight + prism effect becomes, in the wonder-state, something that stops you. The stopping is not unproductive distraction; it is the return of the part of consciousness that lets the world reach you.
A human who cannot wonder cannot be reached by the world. That human becomes brittle, instrumentalized, functionally adequate but spiritually depleted. The condition Macfarlane is calling out is structurally a mental-health condition, and wonder is the resistance.
Children are wonder. They're continually voyaging in wonder.1 The framing is not metaphorical. Children are not experiencing wonder; they are wonder. The condition of childhood — at least in young children — is continuous wonder. The world is freshly miraculous because it has not yet been categorized into the rational inventory.
This is what the Macfarlane-son exchange captures. I'm writing this book about Is a River Alive? The son says, Duh, of course. The son hasn't yet learned to ask the question because the answer was never in doubt. The adult has learned that the question is hard (the apparatus of rationalism requires elaborate work to recover the obvious). The child has not.
Macfarlane's craft project, in some real sense, is to write the way the child sees — to give the adult reader access to the wonder-state that rationalism has displaced. The Otter Spell from The Lost Words is for children, but adults read it too because it works on them. (See Macfarlane Relational Writing Methodology for the lyric and spell tradition.)
It is important to distinguish wonder from sentimentality, mysticism, and anti-rationalism.
Wonder is not sentimentality. Sentimentality is performative emotion about the experience; wonder is the experience. The sentimentalist describes how the rainbow made them feel. The wonderer is stopped by the rainbow.
Wonder is not anti-rationalism. Macfarlane explicitly disagrees with Keats's unweaving the rainbow critique of science. Science finesses the real into wonder. Science doesn't mean unweaving the rainbow. It can help us continue to be astonished by the world just understand a little bit better how it works. So I don't see science and wonder as opposed.1 Knowing the prismatic mechanism of a rainbow doesn't diminish the wonder of standing in front of one.
Wonder is not mysticism. The wonder-state can be triggered by anything sufficiently astonishing — a rainbow, a leaf, a sentence, a piece of music, the bleb of an icicle. It doesn't require religious framing. It requires only the willingness to be stopped.
Macfarlane and intuition-writer-and-creative-process converge on the principle that the writer's job is to preserve access to states the rational mind has been trained to suppress. The intuition-writer tradition treats intuition as the suppressed-faculty; Macfarlane treats wonder as the suppressed-faculty. Both insist that the writer's craft depends on preserving these access-routes.
Macfarlane converges with sahaja non-conceptual awareness (Eastern contemplative tradition) on the principle that the rational inventory state is a learned overlay on top of a more primary perception-state. Both treat the recovery-of-primary-perception as a project worth pursuing. The split is in vocabulary: Macfarlane uses wonder; the contemplative tradition uses sahaja or original mind or Buddha-nature. The referents overlap substantially.
Wonder-as-survival-skill maps onto two adjacent domains where the same primary-perception-recovery principle appears: Eastern-spirituality (the contemplative traditions' practice of recovering pre-conceptual awareness) and psychology (the developmental and trauma literature's understanding that rational-inventory mode can become a defense against overwhelming feeling).
Eastern-Spirituality: Sahaja — Natural State / Non-Conceptual Awareness — the contemplative traditions universally identify a primary perception-state (variously called sahaja, original mind, rigpa, buddha-nature) that exists before the rational-inventory overlay and that can be re-accessed through practice. Macfarlane's wonder is the secular literary articulation of the same recovery-project. The wonder-state and the sahaja-state are not identical (the contemplative traditions describe a state more stable and pervasive than the moment-of-rainbow wonder Macfarlane describes), but they are continuous — wonder is the entry-portal to what the contemplative traditions systematize. The structural identity: both traditions treat the rational-inventory overlay as a learned suppression of a more primary perception-state, and treat recovery of the primary state as worth pursuing. The insight neither domain generates alone: Macfarlane's secular literary wonder-as-survival-skill claim has continuity with contemplative-tradition recovery-practice — and the contemplative traditions offer techniques (sustained meditation; specific somatic practices) that can deepen the wonder-state from momentary to stable. A nature writer who has done contemplative practice writes from a more stable wonder-state than a nature writer who only catches wonder occasionally.
Psychology: Dissociation as Protective Rationalism — the trauma-and-developmental psychology literature documents how the rational-inventory mode can develop as a protective response to overwhelming sensory or emotional input. The child who experiences early overwhelm may learn to lock down the wonder-state because wonder makes the world's intensity more, not less, present. The adult who cannot wonder may be operating an old protective adaptation that no longer serves the present circumstances. Macfarlane's claim that wonder is a survival skill becomes more pointed in this light: the adult who has lost wonder is operating in a defended mode that costs them access to the world. The structural identity: both traditions identify the wonder-suppression mode as a learned adaptation that may have been protective at one time but now limits the adult's relation to reality. The insight neither domain generates alone: Macfarlane's writerly observation about wonder-loss in adults connects to the depth-psychological mechanism of protective dissociation — and the discipline of re-cultivating wonder may be, for some adults, structurally adjacent to trauma-recovery work. The nature writer who has done depth-psychological work understands what wonder-cultivation requires; the depth psychologist who has read Macfarlane sees the literary register of the recovery-project.
A third connection worth marking: wonder-as-survival-skill has structural similarity to portal questions as book engine — both treat a deceptively simple stance (jaw-dropped attention; is a river alive?) as the entry-point to vast interpretive territory.
The Sharpest Implication
If wonder is a survival skill rather than aesthetic flourish, then the adult who has lost wonder is operationally less alive — they have access to the inventoried world but not to the world that can reach them. The uncomfortable implication: most of contemporary adult life is structurally organized to suppress wonder. Productivity culture treats stopping-to-look as wasted time. Information culture treats the rainbow as something to photograph and post rather than stand in front of. Professional adulthood rewards continuous instrumental activity and penalizes the kind of attention that gets stopped by light. The wonder-loss most adults experience is not an individual failing — it is structurally produced. Recovering wonder is, in this framing, a small act of resistance to an environment that systematically extinguishes it.
Generative Questions