Wonder. What Gerald the slow worm taught us about paying attention.

I want to tell you about Gerald. Gerald is a slow worm — technically a legless lizard, not...

I want to tell you about Gerald. Gerald is a slow worm — technically a legless lizard, not a snake — who lives in the garden behind my building. I know he lives there because my daughter found him in September 2023, during what I would have described as a fruitless forty-five minutes she spent crawling under the hedges looking for 'something interesting.' What she found was Gerald. She named him immediately.

She spent the rest of that afternoon with Gerald. Not touching him — she understood he was a wild animal and should not be handled. Watching him. Noting where he went. Describing him to me in careful detail: length approximately thirty centimetres, silvery-grey, moves like slow water. She set an alarm for the next morning to go and see if he was still there.

He was. She has seen him or suspected his presence fourteen times since. She has not found this extraordinary. She finds it completely ordinary, in the way that children find extraordinary things when they have learned to look.

Gerald is still there, as far as my daughter knows. She checks. Every autumn, she spends forty-five minutes under the hedges. The slow worm is still the occasion. The attention is still the practice. The practice, repeated, is still producing something.

This is the hundred edition of WiseTip. A free edition, for all our readers, to mark it.

I chose Gerald for this edition because Gerald represents what we have been trying to do for a hundred editions: notice the small, specific, living thing that is right in front of us. Not the concept — the actual slow worm under the actual hedge, whose actual presence my daughter discovered by spending forty-five minutes doing something that looked, from the outside, like nothing.

Children who are taught to pay attention — to really notice, to name, to return — find Gerald. They find the equivalent of Gerald everywhere: in their classrooms, in their families, in the world they move through. The thing they find may not be a slow worm. But it will be specific and alive and worth naming.

Wonder is not a feeling that arrives from outside. It is a practice that is built by returning to specific things, in specific places, over and over, until the specific thing reveals itself. Gerald revealed himself to my daughter because she crawled under a hedge for forty-five minutes. He will always have crawled under that hedge for forty-five minutes. That forty-five minutes produced a slow worm named Gerald, a careful description of his movement, and fourteen subsequent sightings.

Thank you for reading for a hundred editions. Here is to the next hundred. May they all contain something worth noticing.

This is the hundred edition of WiseTip. A free edition, for all our readers, to mark it. Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. May the next hundred editions contain something as worth noticing as Gerald. The research supports this. The experience confirms it. The practice, done once, changes the understanding. The understanding, changed, changes the behaviour. The behaviour, changed, changes the relationship. That is the whole arc, available in one

What is your child's equivalent of Gerald — the small, specific, living thing they return to, that they have named, that they track over time? Do you know what it is?

And: when your child spends forty-five minutes doing something that looks like nothing — under a hedge, at a window, in a corner — do you trust that something is happening?

This week: find one small thing in your immediate environment and pay it forty-five minutes of genuine attention. With your child if possible. Name it at the end. Return to it next week.

Next week: Edition 101 — Markus on February and connection. Thank you for being here for 100.

Names of people and brands in these editions are changed. Whoever was there and reads this knows what we are talking about.

Markus adds: My son's equivalent of Gerald is a crack in the pavement near our building that has, over three years, produced a succession of plants — first dandelions, then something he can't identify, now what he thinks might be a small fern. He photographs it monthly. He has a folder. He has not needed to be told to do this. He started it himself. The crack revealed itself to him because he was walking slowly. — Markus