In my creative nonfiction class we were told to pick a list from this pile of cut up little pieces of paper. There were so many words spread across the table. Knowing I’d have to write about these things, I tried to pick what I felt I hadn’t explored much.

The top of the list read, “Wonder” in bold letters. From there on it went:

Muse, Ponder, Consider, Dwell, Debate, Mull, Study, Ruminate, Weigh, Question, Doubt, Meditate, Speculate, Puzzle, Think.

I didn’t know what Ruminate meant, so I asked Nivea. She said it meant the same as wonder, that they were all synonyms. When I first picked up the list I hadn’t thought of it like that. I thought maybe the words would fall under the theme of wonder, which I liked because the whole course forces me to wonder in the first place. I never would place doubt under the same category as wonder. They just seemed like a negative and a positive. A parent would love their child to wonder, study, and question, not so much to dwell or mull or doubt.

So I picked up the list and thought about what I could bring out of the idea of wonder. I focused on Question, Ponder, Think, Meditate, and Muse underneath the category or main focus of Wonder. Immediately I thought of Alexis. Alexis, my independent, sassy, superstar of a cousin who is 8 years old and happens to be very curious. Questioning is a majority of what I hear from her.

“What if we were all brothers and sisters and lived in the same house all the time?” I looked at her and she had the brightest, biggest smile on her little face. The idea excited her even more than I would be if the Jonas Brothers started making music again.

I thought about it, really and truly, not in the way you pretend to be thinking when a little kid says something you don’t know how to respond to. The girl makes me think in a way I wouldn’t normally. We were at our cousins’ house in New Jersey and I couldn’t help but light up thinking about all living together too. Her excitement is contagious. I could be having an awful day and just knowing that I’d see her, I knew it would feel better.

This is why I want to teach. The joy that I get from being around the light of children, though I know not all children have this kind of light all the time. This is just one part, knowing that my days can be made better by others, and those others days may be made just a little better by me.