Moments that inspire wonder – like the one captured here at Meiji Jingu in Tokyo – are what I live for

One of my most life defining-experiences came at the tender age of nine. Following my parents’ divorce, my mum, three brothers and I relocated from the UK to Cyprus (my ancestral homeland). My mum wanted a fresh start and we kids were looking forward to spending summers on the beach (the beauty of childhood innocence). So, we moved our lives from my hometown of Lincoln, UK to Ora village, Cyprus.

The population of Ora at the time hovered at around the 200 mark. And while Lincoln, particularly back then, was no sprawling city, the contrast between urban and rural was huge.

During our first summer in Ora, my girlfriends and I were playing in the schoolyard. All of a sudden, without warning, they started running away. I stood there perplexed. At the time, I still couldn’t speak Greek, so I had no idea why they’d left.

The answer quickly came when the boys arrived with their football.

I realised that they weren’t allowed to play with them. Cyprus at the time was deeply conservative, and this was even more pronounced in the villages. Women and girls were expected to uphold a family’s ‘honour’ and ‘prestige’ by staying virgins until they married and avoiding anything that could be perceived as them being ‘impure.’

This included hanging out with guys who weren’t relatives.

Even as a nine-year-old, I was mind blown. I felt so enthralled that getting on a plane for four hours meant you could be transported to a new land where things were unfamiliar and wildly different to wherever you had came from.

In the UK, girls and boys played together with no issues. In the Cyprus of 1992, girls weren’t allowed to play with boys.

I still credit this moment with my enduring love of travel. I decided there and then I wanted to travel the world and see how other people lived.

I remembered this moment earlier this morning when I was reading an article from Psychology Today on How Spirituality Increases Happiness and Productivity. It explores how wonder is a fleeting experience of the world that helps us to see how little we know. In short, it enables us to be in awe and expand our minds. This can lead to a spiritual sense that is said to increase happiness.

“Wonder is a fleeting experience of the world that lets us concretely know how little we know. It is an indicator that our mental frames have been broken by the new content we are trying to insert.”

Hence why I believe I love to travel. My experience in the schoolyard gave me a great sense of wonder, and it’s no coincidence that it’s one of my most vivid childhood memories. My nine-year-old mind expanded a lot from that one moment in time, and I was hooked on the idea of exploring new cultures for life.

And sure enough, every time I travel I do experience wonder. Whether that’s from a traditional dance that I get to see or a spectacular landscape that reveals itself during sunrise. Those moments, the ones in foreign lands that take my breath away, are the ones I live for.

I also believe it’s one of the reasons I love living in Kathmandu – and being in Nepal generally – so much. Because I get to experience wonder here on a regular basis.

So my advice to you is to think of the things that give you a sense of wonder and do more of them. The pandemic had made me give up on the one that gave me the most, so I’m looking to make up for the lost time.

Now, where’s my passport?

What gives you a sense of wonder?

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