Walking into a rainstorm is, quite literally, a wondrous encounter. Glorying in being kissed by the heavens, the pale silver streaks dashing vigour into all of us alike, the looks you get from the busy crowds impart another sort of glory – the glory of not being taken quite seriously. Apparently, I’ve got this whole rainstorm business the wrong way around. The communion of slate sky, icy wind and unprotected man –our participation in precipitation– should be, especially for virtue of being an unfortunate necessity of getting to class, a profoundly miserable experience.

But why? Great souls rebelled with violence at this notion. Emerson said, “Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill… For the world is not painted or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.” That’s right: the very act of walking outside, especially in a rainstorm, should forever banish the idea that life (especially left to necessity) is dull and that there are tedious annoyances along the way. Rather, it should make us poets.

Truly great people never lose their sense of wonder in everyday life: Wordsworth said that “the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion.” Chesterton said “what we call [life’s] triviality is really the tag-end of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten thousand detective stories mixed up with a spoon.” Physicists, the poets of the sciences, go off to study the stars and quantum minutiae with an equal sense of surprise and amazement at the myriad marvels. Anyone with a true, lasting passion for life has this wonder left somewhere. For all of us it is a battle: our imaginations easily become trapped, ensnared by the truth of a foolish world.

So if you are neither poet, wonderer, nor fan of arctic showers, it is not your non-identity with these but a view of life that needs reversing. Remember: having a firm view overturned isn’t always bad. Truly, it is the only sensible course of action when the world is upside down. And the world really is upside-down. Where does this imprisonment of wonder really take place? It is as if the wondrous is so immanent and all-pervasive that it is easily reduced en-mass to the material, then to be ignored. Reductionism, such as it is called, is so prevalent that we witness the tragedy of a world that “will never starve for wonders; but only for want of wonder.”

What brought reductionism in the first place? Perhaps it was the greatest weapon against us: the spiritual tiredness that is our own Sensibility, the Aristotelian Mean, the Karma, the Stoicism, the pessimism and the despair that squelches our spirit with the conviction that Good and Evil must somehow balance in life, for they are equal opposites. Cruel irony: the truth is so much greater than the lie that the truth itself seems unbelievable.

There is only one cure. We must love Truth with reckless abandon, so we must seek God. We each must become what Sidney called a “passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith.” For the universe –and the Bible, for that matter– is full of God’s wild extravagances.

What does it take to walk through life with awe and wonder? We don’t need to be poets to marvel at life; we must only awaken poetry in our souls. We need neither a telescope nor a microscope to see everyday life for the miracle it is. We need new eyes.