Be simple, open, and receptive but inward looking to experience the best in life ― to make the wow-experience happen, not once but over and over again, says BATURAM NAYAK

One of the important ingredients of a healthy and meaningful life, which we often overlook, is the necessity of wonder or a wow-factor. The wow-factor doesn’t happen so easily, but when it does, it leaves behind a catalytic effect on our zest for life.

What is a wow-factor? How does it occur and recur in our life? If we could really harness its effect as an enabling factor in our lives, how enchanting our lives would really be!

Almost everyone among us encounter those revealing moments of life which opens us to the hidden, as yet unexplored aspects of a situation, a happening, or an experience that triggers an understanding like an amazing flash of light  in our mind. This makes one wonder why at all this remained behind a veil so long and kept one waiting for that exciting moment to reveal itself.

Baturam Nayak

The unexpectedness of this awesome experience takes one to such a heightened experience that it feels as if for that very moment, time and space just ceased to exist!

The most rewarding thing about a wow-experience is it making us realise the limits of our mind ― the realization that, however deft we may be in articulating our reality, our inner resources are quite inadequate to comprehend it in its entirety. 

It also makes us understand that there is a lot to derive from the world, which we cannot hope to get through the limited ability of our so-called pragmatic and analytical mind.

However, overcritical, sceptical persons can never wake up to these enabling experiences of life, primarily due to their posturing against people, situations and the reality around. Moreover, it needs a higher degree of openness and generosity to see the awe-inspiring ability of a situation or a person.

A basic understanding of life teaches us that one can never be perfect and fully complete. The interdependence of life is the real beauty of it.

But, one can never see this truth till one overcomes the audacious over-confidence that simply blurs this visibility. There are always enough things left out in the hidden dimensions of the objective and even in our subjective realities, waiting to be revealed― but only for the child-like, open, simple, and receptive-mind.

In this very sense, the very best among the teachers, students, artists, and poets,  and more precisely, the dynamically active and open ones are better suited to encounter these awesome experiences of life, as compared to the superficial, flamboyant and flashy breed.

A wow-endowed person can be highly self-actualising. She or he can also be equally awe-inspiring.

This as such is the beauty of the human phenomenon and the amazing endowment of all of us to engage with the entire universe and wonderfully be.

In sum, be simple, open, and receptive but inward looking to experience the best in life ― to make the wow-experience happen, not once but over and over again.


Baturam Nayak, a postgraduate in economics, joined the banking sector in 1983 and retired in June 2020. He is a firm believer in simplicity and minimalism. “My faith is Oneness, एकत्वम्; that’s the way I would express myself and live in harmony with everything,” he says.

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