What do you achieve by travelling my father asked me last week, a question he supposedly poses to everyone who loves to travel, has to travel or rather wants to travel. I wanted to think for a second but instead I instinctively replied for the wonder that travel entails, quickly adding that it was also the reason I dont enjoy travelling to the same place twice. The joy of the new, of the novel, the novelty of how a place is, the myriad of ways people tend to live, work, play or simply be, the wonder that is in experiencing places that are untouched, the wonder of nature and the wonder of beauty, of course we can experience a sense of wonder in our day to day also too, being wondrous about the beauty in everyday life, the simple sunrise everyday is a thing of wonder, or as the Nuns in my school, my Principal would boom that waking up every single day is a miracle, a thing of wonder. After each day is a day of new wonder.
When I travel the novelty of the situation, the same person in a different place or the feeling of new, the taking in of different ways of being, beauty anew is something of wonder. And then I realised that when I come back home, I strive to bring that same sense of wonder into everything I do. Especially the spaces I create. Looking at the drawing board today at a very incredulous project I am wondering at what would instill in this space a sense of wonder, pun intended! The dictionary meaning of wonder is a feeling of amazement and admiration, caused by something beautiful, remarkable, or unfamiliar; a person or thing regarded as very good, remarkable, or effective; desire to know something; feel curious or even doubt! But it is the feeling of amazement and admiration we look out for. That said there are places we end up travelling to that makes one wonder with doubt, and then comes the gratitude for how much better we have it. In life it is all relative, Einstein with his theory of relativity established just that. So the thing is, the sense of wonder is why we chase new experiences, which could even be something new in the house, new clothes, new things, but what does it take to make the space that we live or work in steep with wonder, to keep us vibrant and alive.
The spaces we inhabit shape us more than we realise, the design of our homes, our workplaces, recreational spaces dictate how much we walk, the amount of sunlight we bask in or the energy that we tend to absorb from our surroundings making design of our built spaces extremely crucial. We may or may not follow the tenets of Vaastu calling it dogma, but logic is infallible and what we definitely could do well to entertain. Needless to say then, form follows function, finance, feeling, frequency and wonder!
Vedasri Siddamsetty 