Exploring the sense of wonder: embracing beauty and building peace

Knowing is an exploratory process: a relationship and interaction with oneself and between oneself and the world. To come into contact with one's own resources is also to come into contact with the world in a primarily aesthetic experience, of sensorial involvement through which one can investigate and attribute meaning to one's actions, know and feel, and thus be able to choose one's own existential planning. "To give meaning to reality through the senses" (B. Munari) and to think that "the hand is the expressive instrument of human intelligence" (M. Montessori) means to give dignity to bodily and aesthetic experience as a foundation to meet and recognize the complexity of reality, the richness of human potential in its activity of knowledge, emotion, and experimentation. Touching beauty is also possible to the extent that one is ready to be touched by the amazement and wonder that the variety of existing forms generate. Sensoriality, in particular haptic action, brings tactile perception and proprioception into play: knowing reality is also knowing one's own body in relation to space, things, the action of knowing and feeling. The haptic sense is rooted in mental activity, it allows the body to perceive its own movement in space; movement is in turn a mediator of interaction, knowledge and emotion. Tactile exploration acts as a unifying consciousness, supporting the concrete reality of an integral existence and a relational continuity between spaces-body-times; tactile values, in fact, change according to positions and distances. Mutlisensoriality does not describe in the anxiety to unify, but rather it speaks of the infinite variety of the world that surrounds us and the unrepeatability of every existing form; it maintains a sense of wonder, an antidote to homologated and stereotyped thought; it educates to the richness of the natural, social, cultural, human environment. To ignore richness is to compromise the beauty of learning, feeling, living; it is to compromise the openness of perspective that allows a global, inclusive and responsible look, but also joyful, proactive and creative.