There's a line in The Great Gatsby that's always stuck with me:

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

I've always felt the same way about autumn in Ontario. I love the summer, but nothing beats the moment September rolls in with its mild twenty-degree days, friendly breezes, and no mosquitoes.

I've already season jumped. We are in the last week of August, but I am already three pumpkin spice lattes deep (Starbucks released them yesterday), and I've been hit with that old autumn conviction that life is beginning over again.

Autumn in Ontario by the Group of Seven.

Part of the ritual is reflecting on the summer just gone. Last summer, I spent two months in Melbourne, and the rest of it at my local skatepark from morning to midnight. I let myself get completely consumed by skateboarding, a lifelong on-and-off hobby of mine. This summer, I took a full-time course load, which has the unfortunate property of causing entire seasons to vanish when you're not looking. I told myself I'd fish, I'd skate, I'd stargaze. I did none of those things, not even once, and let the summer pass me by from behind a computer screen.

The stargazing part especially stings. There's a short list of things you can really only do on summer nights, and one of my favourites is to drive up north somewhere dark and watch the summer meteor showers.

I had a pumpkin spice latte today with a friend of mine (this was #3), and we talked about stargazing. He borrowed his dad's thousand-dollar telescope over the weekend, the kind that GPS-locks your location and automatically points to whatever celestial body you tell it to. He pointed it at Andromeda.

What's wild about Andromeda is that you can actually see it with the naked eye. Not clearly, it looks like a bright, fuzzy star, but still - you are looking at another galaxy. It's not a textbook diagram or a high-res colour-enhanced NASA flick. You are pointing your eyes into the void and catching photons that have traveled two and a half million years so you can register them as "fuzzy blob." That's pretty cool.

If Andromeda were only brighter, it would look like more than a fuzzy blob. The sky would have an enormous smear of galaxy across it:

Andromeda, brighter. It would appear much closer to the moon, but you get the idea.

Many people I have talked to get a similar feeling the first time they look at Saturn through a telescope. The planet pops into focus, hoops in clear view, and you go "oh wow". NASA has photos thousands of times sharper. You could wallpaper your room with them. It doesn't matter.

My friend said his experience stargazing made him think people don't really appreciate beauty in the same way they used to. He said, "a guy used to see one beautiful girl and think about her for the rest of his life." He thinks we've flooded the beauty market.

I don't really buy it. I don't think it's a scarcity problem as much as it is about being there when it happens. Looking through the telescope yourself. Pointing your own finger at the fuzzy blob in the sky and knowing it's our cosmic next door neighbour. In some capacity, humans were put in this world to appreciate it. It's innate.

But I do think it is an interesting question. Is wonder an asymptotic experience? And look, I love technology. I love pumpkin spice lattes and satellites and the whole stack of things that make up modernity. But I do think there is a problem in how we've demystified it. We've let technology become furniture.

And if you remystify it, if you pretend one day you are approached by a wizard who says, "Greetings, I have conjured up a magic mirror that will give you infinite pleasure and entertainment. You will be so happy, you can learn anything, you can do anything... Do you want one?"

And then a villager appears, frantic, and warns you, "Rumour has it, the wizard's magic mirror is cursed. It will change your personality and eat your life. You will stare at it for 70% of your waking hours."

Would you take it? The wizard will insist, of course. He will point at the crowd of the enlightened, the lucky folk of the western world sitting around in a slack-jawed scroll, and he will say, "See? Look how happy they are. This magic mirror is so good, it is almost a human right."

I don't think the "loss of wonder" is a scarcity problem. I don't think society has seen too many beautiful people on Instagram or too many vibrant pictures from the JWST. I think we've forgotten a little where we are. We've lost our sense of scale in some kind of jetlag from the constant travel between the real world and the digital one.

I keep thinking of Neil Postman's 1993 talk at Apple. He said:

"...television should be the last technology we will allow to have been invented and promoted mindlessly. Ok, we just didn't know that much, so we got television and it changed our culture, but that's it, from now on every technology we have to think about."

We've definitely done that...

Anyway, I had a great walk today. And a great chat. The sunlight falls differently this time of year. I find that is a great antidote to distraction: just keep noticing things.