I want to tell you something about the name of this blog.
Snippets of Wonders. I chose those words carefully, not because they sounded nice, though I hope they do, but because they describe the exact thing I have been doing my whole life without always having a name for it. Collecting snippets. Pausing at the edges of things. Asking what if. Following the thread of a question somewhere I had not planned to go.
Wondering.
Not curiosity exactly, though that is part of it. Wondering is softer than curiosity. Curiosity wants to know. Wondering is content, for a moment, to simply not know yet, to sit with the question, to let it open something rather than immediately closing it with an answer. Wondering is the pause before the conclusion. The space between noticing something and deciding what it means.
I have built my entire life in that space. And I have learned, sometimes the hard way, that it is the most valuable thing I have, and the most fragile, and the one that needs the most deliberate protection.
The Life I Built by Wondering
Every Chapter Stared with an If
If I trace the shape of my life honestly, I can see it clearly. Every significant turn, every chapter that became a defining part of who I am, started not with a plan but with a wonder.
Wonder 1 : What if I tried the BPO industry?
The business process outsourcing boom was happening in the Philippines and I simply wondered what it would be like to be part of it. I tried it. Suddenly I was on the phone with American customers, navigating a world that felt completely different from anything I had known, a different time zone, a different culture, a different version of what work could be.
That wondering funded my sister’s education. It expanded what I thought was possible for me. It taught me that the world was larger than the version I had been living in and that I was capable of navigating the larger version.
Wonder 2: What if I taught in Brunei?
I did not have a detailed plan for moving to Brunei. I had a question. What would it be like to teach there? What would I learn that I couldn’t learn at home? The wondering was enough to make me go. And what I found there, different students, different cultural assumptions about learning, different ways of being in a classroom, changed how I taught and how I thought about education in ways that have never left me.
I’m so thankful I wondered and made that decision. Despite challenges, the 7 years of experience was all worth it. Let me share with you The Cultural Mistake I Made in my First Year Teaching in Brunei.
Wonder 3: What if I said yes to a love across cultures?
When my husband proposed, I held the question honestly. Most mixed marriages end in divorce. The statistics were not encouraging. The cultural distance was real. And yet underneath all of that was a quieter, more persistent wonder. Why not find out for myself? Why accept someone else’s statistics as my story before I have lived my own? That wondering led me to a marriage, and then to Sri Lanka, and then to a life I could not have imagined from where I was standing when I first asked the question.
Wonder 4: What if I took my Master’s Degree while working full-time in Brunei?
The timing looked impossible. I was already working full time, a demanding, consuming kind of full time and the idea of adding a postgraduate degree on top of that seemed like exactly the kind of thing sensible people talked themselves out of. I wondered anyway. What if I could do both? What if the difficulty was real but not disqualifying? I did it.
It was hard in the way that genuinely hard things are hard, not glamorously hard, just quietly, persistently demanding. And then something happened that I could not have predicted from where I was standing at the time: that qualification, earned in Brunei under those difficult conditions, became exactly what I needed when I arrived in Sri Lanka and began teaching there. I did not know that would happen when I was sitting with the question. I could not have planned for it. The wondering came first, the meaning came later as it so often does.
Here’s my journey of This is What A Master’s Education Did to Me.
Wonder 5: What if I built work online?
Freelancing was not an obvious next step. It was a wonder, what if work did not have to be a place you go? What if the skills I had built across teaching and communication and marketing could become something I owned rather than something I gave to someone else’s institution? The wondering led to the building. The building led to clients, to Pinterest marketing, to a digital business that has sustained me through a life lived across continents.
Let me share with you My Wonderful Journey to Building a Digital Business.
Wonder 6: What if I built a blog and what if it became something real?
This wonder is different from all the others because it is still unfolding. Snippets of Wonders began as a question, what if I shared what I was learning, reflecting on, and discovering? What if the snippets I was collecting privately could become something that mattered to other people too?
What if one day this space could sustain itself a genuine platform, a source of income, a community of people who believe in the same things I do? The blog is still being built. The monetisation is still being worked toward. The vision of what it could become is still more ahead of me than behind me. And that is exactly as it should be. The most alive wonders are always the ones that have not finished answering yet.
This is Why and How Snippets of Wonders Began.
Wonder 7: What if I travelled alone?
Solo travel felt like something other people did, bolder people, people without the same considerations, people more certain of themselves in unfamiliar places. And then I wondered why not find out if that is actually true? The solo travels that followed taught me things about my own company, my own navigation, my own capacity for being fully present in a new place that I could not have learned any other way. You cannot wonder your way through a city with someone else doing the wondering for you.
Let me share with my 7-day solo trip to Cambodia, A Trip to Siem Reap is What You Need for a Mindful You.
Wonder 8: What if I chose not to have children?
This is perhaps the most personal wonder, the one that required the most courage to sit with honestly rather than answering the way the world expected me to. What if the life I actually wanted did not include that particular chapter? What if I examined that question for myself, with full honesty, rather than accepting the default? The wondering here was not a rejection of anything. It was a commitment to living deliberately, to choosing my life rather than simply following its most expected shape.
I did not plan these chapters. I wondered my way into all of them. And every single one, even the ones still unfolding, has been more interesting, more formative, and more fully mine than anything I could have planned.
What Wondering Actually Is
And Why It Is Different From Curiosity, Research, or Planning
People sometimes assume that wondering is just a softer word for curiosity, or a poetic word for research. It is neither of those things, or rather, it contains both but is larger than either.
Curiosity is active. It wants to find out. It reaches toward an answer. Wondering is more patient, it holds the question without demanding a resolution. It asks ‘what if’ without immediately running the numbers on whether the what-if is viable.
Research is methodical. It starts with a question and works systematically toward an answer. Wondering often doesn’t know what it’s looking for until it finds it. It follows something half-seen, an instinct, a feeling that a certain direction holds something worth discovering, without being able to justify the route in advance.
Planning is about control, mapping the known toward a desired outcome. Wondering is about openness staying available to outcomes that weren’t in the original map.
Wondering is what happens when you refuse to let what you already know close the door on what you haven’t yet found out.
It is also, I have come to believe, the foundation of all genuine learning. Not the absorption of information, that is just intake. Real learning happens when a question opens something in you that was previously closed. And questions only open things when you are genuinely wondering, not performing curiosity, not researching toward a conclusion you’ve already reached, but actually, honestly not knowing yet and being willing to find out.
My Biggest Threat
Why Busyness Is the Enemy of Wondering
Wondering requires something that busyness almost never allows: unscheduled space.
Not rest exactly, though rest helps. Not free time in the calendar sense. Something more specific. The absence of an agenda. The permission to follow a thought without knowing where it is going. The willingness to spend twenty minutes on something that will not appear in any productivity tracker, will not move any project forward, will not produce any visible output.
Busyness, the particular kind that fills every hour with tasks that feel urgent, is the most effective wonder-killer I know. Not because it is malicious, but because it is so convincing. When there is always something to do, wondering starts to feel irresponsible. Indulgent. A luxury for people who don’t have enough on their plate.
But here is what I know from the evidence of my own life, the hours I spent wondering have returned more than almost any hours I spent being productively busy.
The wondering about the BPO industry was not on anyone’s task list. The wondering about Brunei was not a productivity win. The wondering about what work online could look like came in a quiet moment, not a structured brainstorm. The wondering has always happened in the margins, in the spaces between obligations, in the walks I almost didn’t take, in the K-dramas I watched when I ‘should’ have been doing something else.
This is why I protect it now more deliberately than I used to. Not because I have more time, I don’t, particularly. But because I understand better what I lose when I let busyness crowd wondering out completely. I lose the next chapter. I lose the question that hasn’t been asked yet. I lose the thread that leads somewhere I cannot yet see.
What Keeps It Alive
How K-Dramas, Travel, and Teaching Have Kept Me Wondering
If busyness is the enemy of wondering, then the things that protect it are the ones that reliably return me to a state of not-knowing of being genuinely open to a question I haven’t finished answering yet.
For me, the most reliable of these has always been stories. K-dramas in particular.
I know that might sound like a small thing. But here is what a good K-drama does that almost nothing else in my life does as consistently: it puts me in front of a life that is not mine and asks me, quietly but persistently, to wonder about it. Why did she make that choice? What would I have done? What does this moment say about what people need, what I need, that I haven’t been paying attention to? What is this drama teaching me about the thing I thought I already understood?
That wondering, the kind that starts with someone else’s story and curves back toward your own life, is the most productive thinking I do. It has generated more genuine insights, more honest self-examination, more ‘wait, what do I actually believe about this’ moments than almost any formal learning I have pursued.
Travel does something similar, but with place instead of story. A new country asks questions that your home country never thinks to ask about how things could be organised differently, about which of your habits are choices and which are just defaults, about what you assumed was universal that turns out to be simply local. Sri Lanka asked me questions about home and belonging and adaptability that the Philippines could never have asked me. Brunei asked me questions about learning and culture and difference that changed how I taught for the rest of my career.
And teaching, even now, even in its evolved form through writing and courses and workshops, keeps me wondering because students and readers ask things I had stopped asking. They have not yet settled into the answers I settled into years ago. Their questions reopen things I had closed. That is one of the most valuable things about teaching: it keeps the teacher a learner.
How I Protect It Deliberately
The Practices That Keep Wondering Alive in a Busy Life
These are not grand strategies. They are small, deliberate habits, things I have learned to protect because I know what happens when I don’t.
01 – I watch dramas with a journal nearby.
Not to take notes compulsively, but because sometimes a scene will open a question I want to sit with before it closes. The journal is permission to wonder on paper. A single question, written down, often leads somewhere I didn’t expect.
02 – I protect at least one unscheduled hour a week.
No task, no project, no agenda. Just time that is available for whatever thought wants to arrive. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I walk. Sometimes I sit with a question that has been waiting. This hour is non-negotiable because it is where wondering lives.
03 – I ask ‘what if’ before I ask ‘how’.
The ‘how’ question is efficient and practical and closes things down quickly. The ‘what if’ question is generative and open and sometimes leads somewhere the ‘how’ would never have found. I try to spend time with the ‘what if’ before I reach for the ‘how.’
04 – I travel somewhere new when I can feel wondering dimming.
New places are the fastest reset I know. They force new eyes. They make the familiar strange again — and strangeness is where wondering lives. Even a new neighbourhood, a new cafe, a new route home can do something small but real.
05 – I write about what I am wondering which is why this blog exists.
Snippets of Wonders was not built to share what I know. It was built to share what I am wondering about. The writing is part of the wondering it takes a half-formed question and follows it somewhere, on the page, until something becomes a little clearer. If these posts make you wonder something you weren’t wondering before, that is the whole point.
Go Deeper
What Are You Wondering Right Now?
These questions are an invitation, not a homework assignment. Sit with the one that opens something.
Journal Prompts What Are You Wondering?
1. When was the last time you followed a wondering somewhere you didn’t plan to go? What happened? What did it open for you that a plan never could have?
2. What is the wondering you have been suppressing, the ‘what if’ you keep dismissing as impractical, irresponsible, or not the right time? What would it mean to let yourself sit with it honestly, just for a week?
3. What has been crowding your wondering out lately, what specific version of busyness or pressure has been making wondering feel like a luxury you can’t afford? What is one thing you could protect, starting this week, that would give wondering a little more room?
A Final Thought
I named this blog Snippets of Wonders because I wanted to remember what I was doing here.
Not building a content strategy. Not optimising for search. Not performing expertise or projecting authority or demonstrating that I have figured things out. Wondering. Collecting the small moments where something opened, a drama, a journey, a conversation, a question asked by a student or a reader and following the thread.
Every significant thing in my life came from that. The countries I have lived in. The work I have built. The marriage I chose. The person I am still becoming.
I protect wondering fiercely because I have seen what it builds. Not quickly, not glamorously, not on anyone else’s timeline. But surely. One question at a time. One what-if followed honestly into wherever it goes.
The snippets accumulate. And eventually if you keep pausing long enough to notice them they become a life you actually chose.
If this post made you wonder something, keep going.
My Goal Setting Course was built for people who are in a wondering season who can feel the next chapter forming but need a framework to follow it intentionally. Reflection first. Your particular wondering, supported.
(We write our content in the hope of making you, our readers, feel a little more inspired in a time when you’re probably feeling low. We hope you feel a little lighter after visiting our site. Then, we know we’ve served our purpose.⭐)
🍀 Let’s Stay Connected
If this post resonated with you, let’s keep in touch. I share more on:
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- 💻 Plus, I regularly share digital products and courses to support freelancers, educators, and startups on all three platforms.
Let’s connect. I’d love to learn about your journey too!
