Exploring is journeying in the domain of purposeful action. We can stand in awe, or sit and wonder; when we explore, we make life’s journey more complete.

Awe is a feeling, mainly. Wonder is mainly about our thoughts. When we explore, we take action.

We could say that awe and wonder produce the behavior we call exploration. However, as is well known in early childhood psychology, infants and toddlers begin to explore the world long before they have developed a mature sense of awe or have developed sufficient intellectual capacity to wonder as adults might do. A child who strikes himself on the head with a sponge is exploring the world. He finds that the sponge is soft. Then he strikes his head with a wooden block, and finds that it is hard. This process continues throughout life, progressing in sophistication as the brain and mind develop, and experience is gained.

In addition to becoming more sophisticated throughout life, the time relationship between exploring and awe/wonder reverses. In early childhood, the dominant model is to explore, and thereby learn. In adulthood, the dominant model is to consider action before taking it: to look before we leap.

The brain does not all develop at the same time. It develops from the bottom up, starting with the brain stem and cerebellum, which control active functions like breathing before we can think about them. Neonates are largely action machines, who receive stimuli and respond. Rudimentary emotions appear to be present in neonates but they become more sophisticated and, as most of us evaluate it, richer as we age and mature. This is to be expected, because the child’s brain is developing. Emotions are processed mainly in the midbrain. The final domain to develop is the domain of thinking, which resides mainly in the cerebral cortex. The cortex is the outer portion of the brain, the last to have developed in each of us, and the last to have developed in the evolution of species. Precursors of the brain are essentially action machines. For example, ants have mushroom bodies and a central complex, which are rudimentary beginnings of a brain.

As organisms evolved, the brains in some species became more complex. Our rich emotional lives can be traced throughout evolutionary history. Scholarship on emotions in insects, invertebrates generally, bees, Drosophila, fish, reptiles, birds, chickens, ungulates (goats, cattle, pigs, sheep, horses and others) mammals (chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons, bonobos, whales, dolphins, porpoises, dogs, cats, mice, raccoons, rabbits, lions, foxes, elephants), and many other non-human animals, is abundant. At least one study has addressed the body language of cows in relation to their emotions. Subcortical brain structures control many of the brain’s processes. Hemispheric lateralization of emotion in primates predates the appearance of humans. Studies have focused on the evolutionary development of particular neurons.

However, the domains of being are not neatly segregated in the brain; instead, they rely on interactions in many parts of the brain. For our purposes, the precise brain-location of an emotion, such as Love, is less important than its experience and consequences. As an analogy, we still make good and essential use of Newton’s physics, long after Einstein and others disproved some of Newton’s interpretations. Apples fall from trees, notwithstanding that Newton misunderstood what gravity is. By analogy, development of emotions and intellectual thought roughly tracks the evolutionary development of the brain, beginning at the bottom with brain stem, working up through the hypothalamus and midbrain, and culminating – in a sense – in the cerebral cortex, where perhaps most intellectual operations are processed. Just because a general process such as emotion took off in the midbrain does not mean that it is entirely confined there. The evolutionary development of the brain did not neatly segregate the brain’s functions. That is not how the brain works. It houses neither a homunculus nor a trio or any other number of independent homunculi. Brain processes result from interactions throughout the brain.

However, as the brain has added processes, through evolutionary development, the distinctions we characterize as action, emotion and thought have emerged more fully. The reason why neonates cannot do math is that their brains have not sufficiently developed. The reason why they cry uncontrollably is that their rudimentary midbrains are not yet sufficiently wired to the parts of the brain that will eventually develop, enabling the once-baby to regulate her emotions. The process of brain development for mathematical aptitude continues for many years, which is why most pre-teen children are not ready for calculus. Our marvelous human cerebral cortex has made possible language, mathematics and many other intellectual operations as we know them. Now back to the subject of exploring.

A wealth of art and history tells the story of how humans have explored the world and ourselves. Exploration led to the discovery of new places and the spread of humans throughout the world. Great explorers include Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Ferdinand Magellan, and Roald Amundsen.

Science and the study of history and every subject are explorations. In physics, the great explorers include Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein; in historical scholarship, Herodotus, Quentin Skinner, and Fernand Braudel; in archaeology, Julio Tello, Gordon Willey, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann; in cosmology, Tycho Brahe, Edwin Hubble, and Stephen Hawking; in medicine, Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, and Richard H. Lawler; in education, John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and Jaime Escalante.

All of art is an exploration. In the visual arts, the great explorers include Rembrandt van Rijn, Salvador Dali, and Jackson Pollock; in music, Johann Sebastian Bach, Gustav Mahler, and Igor Stravinsky; in literature, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens; in poetry, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost.

Ordinary people make their own explorations of the world and each other. Education is by nature an exploration: students, old and young, explore by sitting at a desk and doing mathematics, or reading poetry. Exploration may be a physical journey or a journey within the self.

By nurturing our natural inclinations for awe, wonder and exploration, we can develop a framework for a journey that leads to a life of meaning and purpose, in good orderly direction.

A sense of awe and wonder leads naturally to an inclination to explore. Whenever a value includes a thought, an emotion and an action, the thought and the emotion are the parents of the action. The Christian trinity expresses this symbolically, with the Spirit or animating force (emotion – feminine principle) combining with the Word (thought – masculine principle) to produce their manifestation in the world (action, the word and spirit made flesh). This week is about venturing forth. Exploration is the expression of that.