Tracking Wonder summary

Let’s start our exploration of wonder in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream game reserve. 

It’s a place known for its lush rainforests and gorgeous lake views, but it’s most famous for being the place where Jane Goodall made groundbreaking discoveries about chimpanzees, like how they use tools and have many social behaviors similar to humans.

Some time later, another scientist observed something else extraordinary about chimps— something not as well known, but perhaps equally compelling.It all started when a particular chimp caught the attention of evolutionary biologist Harold Bauer. This mature male chimp had detoured away from the food-foraging area and wandered through thick forest to a 25-foot waterfall. It was magnificent to behold, spraying mist for seventy feet in the dense green forest. There, the chimp sat, simply staring. Suddenly, he leaped up to pound his fists on the trees and hoot.

The next day, he did it all again—and again the next day. He’d sit and gaze, run up to the waterfall, sometimes rock back and forth, and hoot. 

The chimpanzee’s behavior was puzzling. After all, the waterfall didn’t provide food, and it wasn’t a main source of water either. In fact, it was completely out of the way from their food sources. What was going on with this ape?

It appeared that, since the waterfall provided no material value to the chimp, that it was like doing nothing more than contemplating the waterfall’s beauty. Soon the researchers noticed other chimps marveling at the waterfall as well.

Renowned anthropologist Marcus Konner posits that these behaviors in chimpanzees suggest that our own tendency to wonder at the beauty of life is something ancient and fundamental, something deeply hardwired into what it means to be human.

When we contemplate a sight of power and beauty, like a 25-foot waterfall, it can lift us out of ourselves and into a higher, and objectively better, state of mind. And that state of mind is a sense of wonder.

Like the chimpanzee’s mysterious connection to the waterfall, your own sense of wonder might not have any outwardly practical use. But, as we’ll find, pausing work to make time for wonder can paradoxically make you more productive by opening you up to approach challenges creatively.

Let’s get into how exactly we do that, by “tracking” our wonder. It’s the practice of tapping into our innate capacity for wonder by developing its facets: openness, curiosity, hope, and admiration.