When was the last time you felt true wonder?

In 2016, my family and I moved from our childhood home in East London to a flashy new apartment in Saudi Arabia. For a 13 year old who had never even moved houses before, this was a monumental change.

I remember leaving the airport and feeling the warm breeze of the desert-heat hit me, as if I’d opened the door to a pre-heated oven. Our apartment stood along a strip of expensive houses, whose fences cascaded so high that you could barely see the tops of their roofs. Yet every time we’d pass by, my brother and I would play the same game of “what house would you want to be yours” - a game that never gets old.

Our apartment was also sandwiched in between two mosques. I had seen mosques before, but these were…different.

Different in the sense that their monumentality and symmetry was unlike anything I had ever seen. Adorned in marble, they glistened in the evening heat and featured engravings of kaleidoscopic patterns that made it hard to imagine that someone had sat there and carved them by hand. Around me, the reverberating sound of the call to prayer echoed and the strong but sweet smell of oud laced the surrounding area.

Like a young girl in a Herbert Drapers’ painting, I stood there in awe. I didn’t know anything about architecture and hadn’t yet studied art history, but even I knew what a spectacle this was to witness.

Fast-forward six years, where I was in Scotland, sitting in a giant hall ready to start my lecture on Islamic Art, when my professor wrote a word on the board. Ajāib.

“It means wonder”, he said.

In the 16th century, the Persian philosopher, Qazwini, described ajāib as, ‘the sense of bewilderment felt by a person’. It was a core principle of Islamic art and people’s everyday lives. Wonder was so valued that in Islamic manuscripts, portraits of people in states of wonder (signified by their finger to their mouth) was a repetitive and fundamental theme.

But, wonder wasn’t just the awe you felt from seeing a grand building or a beautiful scultpure. It was the experience of something that, for a moment, made you forget where you were and what worries you had.

In a 16th century mosque, it was how the screen-patterned windows would, in the correct time of day, have dispersed shadows of flowers and trees onto the floor. Or how the main source of light would have come from the furnishing of hundreds of oil lamps and candles; making the interior resemble a starry night sky. And how the fragrance of incense would have perfumed the entire building with the sweet smells of rose water and jasmine.

Wonder wasn’t just the act of seeing something amazing. It was the act of feeling something amazing. It didn’t have to be something extravangant, but it had to be something that touched almost every sense in your body.

Since coming home from uni, I’ve been borrowing my mum’s masseuse and treating myself to a massage. Well, I say massage, but really it’s been more like therapy. Our masseuse is a beaming, positive, and sparkly - as she’d probably call herself - woman. She’s the sort of person you’d either think is a bit mad or insanely wise.

In our last session, I was spewing out the same old rant about how monotonous my life felt, and how I was worrying about things that hadn’t even happened yet, when I paused to ask her how she never seems to be anxious.

“It’s because I try to find the wonder in the everyday”, she said.

Wonder. It was a word I hadn’t heard since that course at uni. But, suddenly I was brought back to how pivotal it was.

If ancient teachings valued the principle of wonder so much, why didn’t I? So, I began to search for moments of wonder in my everyday life.

A few days later, I went on a walk with my mum and we stopped to sit on a bench along the canal. We sat there in silence as I watched the water ripple and glisten like diamonds. There was a gentle breeze that swayed the long grass and carried the warm smell of coffee from a café nearby. Below the trees, the distant melody of birds chirping drowned out the city noise, and for a moment, my worries disappeared.

I went home later that day and jotted it down. Finally, it was a moment of wonder in my everyday life!

I hope you enjoyed this more personal read! If you’ve had a moment of wonder recently, please share it with me in the comments below - I’d love to hear them 💓 If not, then this is your sign to start looking for them.

*I also want to mention