Who I Am…
I'm a writer based in Orlando, Florida. I spent most of my career in leadership before I started taking seriously a question that had been quietly following me for years: what happens to us between childhood and adulthood that changes the way we see the world — and is there a way back?
The result is a book called The Wonder Years. Not the TV show. Not nostalgia. Something more fundamental: the capacity to be genuinely, openly, disarmingly astonished by the world we live in.
It Starts With Ben…
My grandfather grew up in Augusta, Georgia. He loved golf the way some people love God — with reverence, with attention, with a kind of devotion that never wore out. He took me to Augusta National when I was young, and standing on that course, I watched him see something I couldn't quite see myself.
He never lost his sense of wonder. Not once in his life. He handed it to me like an heirloom, and I spent thirty years setting it down without realizing what I'd done.
The Forgetting is the Story…
Children ask hundreds of questions a day. Adults ask almost none. Something happens between childhood and adulthood — not just the accumulation of knowledge, but the slow closing of what I call the aperture of wonder.
We don't lose wonder because we grow up. We lose it because we are rewarded for certainty. For efficiency. For knowing. Every time we say "I already know this," we close a door a little further. Eventually, without ever deciding to, we stop noticing new doors at all.
That's what this site is about. That's what the book is about. Not sentimentality. Not a self-help formula. A genuine reckoning with what wonder is, where it goes, and what it takes to find your way back.
Why I’m Writing This Now…
I became a grandfather. And watching my grandson see the world — really see it, without the film of familiarity that coats everything for adults — I recognized something I had lost without knowing I'd lost it. Not innocence. Not childhood. Wonder. The actual, specific, neurological, philosophical thing.
My faith deepened the question. The Christian tradition has always taken seriously what philosophers call awe and what poets call attention. Reading the Psalms in midlife is a different experience than reading them at twenty.
I started writing — and slowly, a book began to take shape.
This Site is Where I Think Out Loud…
Every essay here lives in the universe of the book. Some are research. Some are memory. Some are just moments that stopped me mid-week and demanded to be written down. I publish them because writing about wonder, I've found, is itself an act of reclamation.
If any of this resonates — if you've felt the slow dimming of something you can't quite name — I'd be glad to have you along.