When you were young, did you think telescopes or microscopes were the coolest things?
You could get a telescope to bring the big things into much closer view. It brought the man in the moon right to your house in crater form and you could try to draw the rising moon for an art project. Blurry galaxies became clearer specs of stardust and some suddenly even had beautiful varieties of color if you went out to the ball field at the bottom of the hill or a farm field when you went to camp and just looked up.
Or having a microscope meant you could pluck a hair from your best friend's head and look at the ridges, figuring out which way the hair grows. You could grow your own crystals through a science kit (or by a creative mom showing you how to make a salt water suspension with food dye, drying it to see colored salt crystals made in your own kitchen) and look at how these teeny tiny building blocks adhere together as you looked down.
Both of these tools brought things into better focus, where you could see the big picture before putting your eye to the portal to the world beyond your fingertips. And when we outgrew these adventures, do you see any tools surrounding you today that inspire your imagination and dare you to dream every day at your job?
Do you remember why you stopped thinking about wicked problems, eventually going along with the status quo? Children have an uncanny way of taking the impossible and making it come alive, creating fantastic questions (where fantastic is the real definition of "extraordinarily good; challenging beliefs") and awesome solutions (as "inspirations of reverence").
It's interesting that within the definition of awesome it notes that awesome things can also inspire fear. Fear of what if that's really what out there, little men with antenna watching us from another planet... Fear of what we might learn about the evolution of bacteria and diseases...
The cliche "what would you do if you were not afraid" applies today just as much as it did when we were little. We didn't have preconceived notions as children, ones that would separate us based on foolish lines as we get older, lines drawn in the sand or determined by which way the wind blows from generation to generation.
Whether you decide to look up or look down, take your sleeping child-like wonder and shake it awake. Apply it to wicked problems in order to make a positive difference in the life of someone else. You might surprise yourself (as "an astonishing event").
