The balance between wisdom and wonder

It’s funny how growing older makes me long to return to childlikeness — to that state of wide-eyed wonder. The paradox is almost poetic: how can we carry the wisdom of age and yet move through the world with the innocence of curiosity? How do we learn and unlearn, all at once?

Somewhere along the way, our pace quickened — stress, pressure, and expectation began to shape us. What was once an open, curious mind became armoured by habit and hesitation. Yet beneath the noise and conditioning, our original nature remains — pure, receptive, and endlessly adaptive.

How do we ensure that as we grow through life, we do not harden into cynicism? How do we hold the wisdom of our experiences without letting them close our hearts?

Cynicism tries to convince us that it’s the wiser choice — that it protects us from disappointment, embarrassment, or being caught off guard again. But cynicism is usually a symptom of a tired nervous system — a system that has carried too much for too long without rest.

Curiosity, on the other hand, is born from regulation.
When the body feels safe, the mind can soften.
When the breath is slow, the heart becomes receptive again.
When we are grounded, something inside remembers how to wonder.

Curiosity is not naïve.
It’s resilient.
It says: “I am safe enough to look again.”

And this is why curiosity is the most graceful way of meeting reality.

When we stay curious, we don’t collapse into the automatic stories our minds have rehearsed for years. We give ourselves space to see what is actually here — not what our fear projects, not what our past insists must be true, not what our exhaustion tries to pre-emptively protect us from.

Curiosity slows us down.
Curiosity helps us stay present.
Curiosity keeps us soft.

And in this softness, we expand our window of tolerance — not through force, but through gentle attention. We are no longer reacting from old wounds; we are responding from a grounded present.

To relax into curiosity is to choose spaciousness over defence.
It is to remain awake to possibility.
It is how we keep evolving long after the world assumes we’re set in our ways.

This is how we remain alive inside our lives.

May we keep cultivating the kind of rest that makes curiosity possible — so we can continue to meet reality not with fear, but with grace.

The real art of growth is not just accumulating wisdom, but remembering how to return to that soft, spacious awareness within us. To let life teach us without hardening us. To meet the world, again and again, not with defence, but with wonder.Much love, Gabrielle

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” — Rainer Maria Rilke