How to Find Your Way Back to Something That Feels Like Wonder
Rediscover joy, curiosity, and meaning in midlife — even when life feels flat. For anyone longing to feel more alive in their own lives again and revive their sense of wonder.
There’s a part of you — a quiet, flickering part — that still wants to feel something.
It’s not loud. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t demand attention.
But it’s there. Beneath the routines, the responsibilities, the relentless noise of everything that needs doing. A small ache. A soft whisper. A sense that life could feel… more alive again.
Not bigger. Not busier. Not more impressive.
Just with more of you in it.
I know that feeling.
I’ve stood in the middle of my life and wondered where my curiosity went.
Where my joy went.
Where my sense of play or possibility or even lightness had gone.
And I’ve looked at my full calendar, my full shelves, my full days — and felt strangely empty inside them.
It’s not that anything was wrong. It’s just that something had quietly dimmed. Something I hadn’t even noticed slipping away.
And for a long time, I told myself I just needed a break. Or a holiday. Or a good night’s sleep. But what I was really missing was something else that I’d been overlooking for a while:
Wonder.
Not in the magical, childlike, fireworks-and-miracles kind of way (though maybe sometimes that too).
But in the sense of being moved by something again.
Touched. Stirred. Lit up, even momentarily, by something that reminded me I was still human, still noticing, still capable of feeling something beyond obligation or exhaustion.
And slowly — gently — I began to find my way back.
Not through anything big or profound. Just small shifts in attention.
Small moments.
I started capturing tiny glimmers each day. Nothing curated or worthy or remarkable — just things that made me feel something, even briefly.
A painting that enlivened something in me.
A phrase that landed well.
The smell of toast.
A pop song on the journey to school.
The sound of rain on the roof while I lay in bed on a Sunday morning.
These weren’t dramatic changes. But they were enough to soften something.
They were enough to remind me that I could still feel.
That I could still find beauty in things.
That I could still belong to my own life.
Because that’s what wonder does — it brings you back.
Not just to the world, but to yourself.
So if you’ve been feeling flat, a little grey around the edges, a little disconnected from the feeling of joy or inspiration or spontaneity — start smaller.
Don’t search for a grand purpose or a huge transformation — ways to blow up your life or burn it down.
Search for texture. For moments. For anything that catches your breath or relax your shoulders or makes you pause and think: Yes. That.
That’s enough.
That’s the beginning.
That’s wonder — quietly making its way back to you.
How Might Wonder Show Up In Your Well-being Prescription?
If you’re curious about how to bring more awe and wonder back into your days, book one of our sessions to create your tailored well-being plan.
You can opt to look at how wonder could show up more in your life, how to follow curiosity wherever it leads you, and how to seek out the interesting during these midlife days.
Learn about our wonder pathway here and how our well-being prescriptions work here.
Subscribe to our special midlife newsletter for tailored advice about navigating this part of your life with more curiosity and wonder.
Lost at Home: Prompts for thriving while social-distancing
We’ve put together a quick guide for how to maintain your mental wellbeing while social-distancing.
We all have the same basic needs — even when we’re stuck at home. While If Lost Start Here generally focuses on the *places* we go to meet these needs, we’re pivoting and reassessing to find ways to meet them from home. From finding community and connection to discovering your own creative potential, we’ve collected some of our ideas for thriving while social distancing. Have something to add? Feel free to share ideas in the comments below! This is in no way an exhaustive list! (And of course, please share with anyone who may need a boost of inspiration!)
826 Valencia
826 Valencia is keeping space for our kids’ imaginations in our cities, and crafting magical spaces for our communities and for ourselves as it does so.
“826 Valencia is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.”
Yes, you might think you have just found yourself in a quirky pirate store or an octopus’ playground or a secret spy society, but what you’ve done is landed right at the heart of a non-profit organization that exists to support the writing skills of under-resourced kids. Maybe purpose is like medicine and you need some sugar to help it go down (not sure who does that other than Mary Poppins and her charges but it’s an association that’s stuck). For 826 Valencia and its network of storefront chapters across the US, the sugar takes the form of magic and the imagination: each of their much-needed writing centers are fronted by spaces of whimsy and curiosity.
From its start in San Francisco’s Mission District in 2002, a delightful sense of wonder has been built into how the organization has crafted itself: the first flagship that opened at 826 Valencia Street by educator Ninive Calegari and author Dave Eggers took the form of a pirate store mostly as a workaround for a local zoning issue that demanded some retail component. So of course, pirates need stores too. That model of locating the idiosyncratic in the everyday has inspired further storefront locations across the US; there’s the secret agent supply store (Chicago), a magic shop (Washington), a time travel mart (LA), a robot supply and repair shop (Michigan), a Haunting supply store (New Orleans), a Super Hero Supply Store (NYC), and maybe our favorite the Bigfoot Research Institute (Boston).
The original SF location has since been joined by two more in the city that capture this same spirit of make-believe: the wonderful Enchanted Forest and Learning Center in Mission Bay and the King Carl Emporium in the Tenderloin. In whatever shape-shifting form it takes across the US, 826 Valencia cultivates places of the imaginary and places of very real need, sitting quite naturally next to each other
Photo Interstice Architects
826 Valencia is one of the few places holding space for the imagination on our city streets and in our children’s lives. Think about its latest iteration in the Tenderloin in which a liqueur store associated with drug trafficking and anti-social behavior was converted into a playful apothecary of sorts and a light-filled writing space (also note the brightly colored, game-changing ocean-themed painted exterior). A space that might feel simply enchanting is actually a crucial vehicle for revitalizing a street corner, a community, and a child’s life.
And it also might do this. 826 Valencia might put a spell on your own. Because you get to come in, not just to purchase unicorn horn’s polish, an eye patch or Lumber Jack Repellant, but to participate, to be one of the grown-ups bringing writing to kids who need it. This is where the magic of a different kind starts to happen. Because the core belief running through all these spaces is that kids benefit greatly in confidence, pride and ability from dedicated, focused time on their writing skills—that’s in obvious ways like crafting a personal essay and helping with homework but in other more exploratory ones like working out how to express themselves in poetry and the written word.
826 Valencia is run on volunteers like you who get to tutor in their writing programs or to donate services such as illustration, design, photography and audio editing in order to create the books, magazines, and newspapers that take the students' words beyond their schools and these storefronts.
With 826 Valencia, we can have magic on our streets again and in our kids’ imaginations. We even get to have it back in our own very grown-up lives.
The Museum of Ice Cream
The Museum of Ice Cream might seem like it’s about sugary confections, and equally as sweet images, but approach it as a place of connection and then it becomes something else entirely different.
Ok, you probably have your assumptions about the Museum of Ice Cream that has been popping up in locations in San Francisco (now permanent), New York (very new and permanent), Miami, and Los Angeles. We had ours. We imagined it as an Instagram mecca, a hyperreal pink (that’s Pantone 1905C) paradise of shine and shimmer. Froth and frolics. And it was that: when we visited the SF version, we took photos with everyone else against backdrops of floating cherries and giant popsicles, made impermanent messages with pink magnets, crawled into mirrored rooms and climbed pink walls, and swam deep in the famous pit of colors. We hadn’t gone as far as some; we hadn’t coordinated our outfits and we hadn’t posed again and again for the perfect shot. But we had image-laden fun: we consumed a ton of sugar, visual and edible. We laughed and interacted and just spent a silly afternoon with our kids actually sharing in their joy and not watching from the sidelines as is sometimes the condition of modern parenting.
Though we did all this and came away feeling great (maybe slightly sick also), we have since realized we kind of missed the point. And maybe we weren’t, or aren’t, the only ones. See the Museum of Ice Cream is not really about ice cream (though there’s now a Target branded line that includes such things as Impeach-Mint so this argument might get a bit blurry). It’s also not about taking out your phone to capture the perfect image. It’s also not about screeching through oblivious of those around you as you try to craft the perfect time. What we have since learned is that that it is fundamentally about connection. That’s right, this experience, this museum, now handily rebranded by its founders as an ‘experium’, has been engineered to bring people together, to be a kind of social glue, albeit of the creamy vanilla kind.
It was this episode of Yale associated podcast The Happiness Lab by Dr. Laurie Santos that started to shift our perspective, and as we dug deeper into the motivation of co-founders Maryellis Bunn and Manish Voramotivation, we found more and more that spoke to The Museum of Ice Cream as a counterpoint to our current epidemic of disconnection and the loss of spaces in our worlds that give us the opportunities to just be people together.
Here’s the irony: The Museum of Ice Cream was intended to be so spectacular that we wouldn’t be driven into the world of image-making on our phones, but rather we would be driven away from them. We’d want to immerse ourselves more in this fantasy world, for a short time tangibly all around us, because it was more real, more compelling, than those pixels. We would want to share that experience with those following a similar journey through the joyful labyrinthine spaces, as that would heighten our own experience for us. We’d want to escape our isolation and run into a place of collective joy.
The Museum of Ice Cream has since pivoted and like all new concepts iterated on its theme. Yes, it’s a huge phenomenon that you may have visited, probably most likely have an opinion on, or are in the process of imitating (see the idiosyncratic experiential museums that it has since spawned), but it’s also still figuring itself out. Like Solo Nights (where you get in free if you turn up alone) and the phone free sessions; the Museum of Ice Cream concept is truly working when people connect within this fantasy palace, when they notice what’s actually around them and each other, and when the conversations started within the shininess go outside its walls, and sometimes that needs a phone-free helping hand.
The Museum of Ice Cream is a pop-up experience that’s meant to last more than the sugar high even as it gives you that high. It’s a careful line to tread, but we’re betting that as long as it's as much about the people it buoys up as the abundance of ice cream (or whatever the framework may become) that is consumed then this will stay a place of comfort that continues to soothe our disconnected lives.
