Living a Life of Radical Amazement in 2024
My typical year-end practice is to stop, reflect and capture the lessons I learned to help inform how to navigate the new year. A few days before NYE, I was reading and came across the term, ‘radical amazement’ in reference to the need to practice daily gratitude. Sometimes, I don’t find it easy to be grateful, especially when things seem overwhelming and out of control. Yet, it’s an important practice I’m developing into a habit. What makes it easier? Being around preschoolers because they are radically amazed by just about everything around them! We tend to lose this gift as we age, and I, for one, want to reclaim it because it’s a gift we’ve been given, if we choose it.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a social justice and civil rights leader is credited with coining this term. “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
As we start a new year, we all feel the chaos from wars, natural disasters, a roller-coaster stock market, a divisive political environment, and much more. A number of our crew are dealing with the impacts of cancer, death, divorce, and mental illness. How do we navigate a world where one moment everything is going well and the next your world is turned upside down? It’s by our choices and the people we surround ourselves with. Why not choose radical amazement and a crew of people who will care with you? Take a moment and think back to last time you were radically amazed. For me, it was on NYE at the Idaho Potato Drop when the fireworks blew right in front of me! I’m also radically amazed by the grandeur of Idaho’s majestic mountains, the wildness of our rivers, the blanket of wildflowers in Stanley in the spring, the laugh of my grandchildren, the raw beauty of human beings in all the diversity of colors, sizes, shapes and backgrounds.
I don’t diminish the pain, struggle, challenges or hardships around me. It’s important to show up for others in their pain and challenges, while also keeping one eye open to be radically amazed in and through the hardship. Would you consider stepping into the year with courage to learn how to do the hard things that this world needs leaders to do in order to bring peace into divisive spaces?
Rabbi Heschel stated, “As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”
Drop us a line at info@IdahoPartners4Good.org and let us know what you are radically amazed by and whether you will join our efforts to learn how to do the hard things leaders need to do to build more places where peace can reign.