I Wonder: a book about what happens on the tops

I wrote a book! That's the sort of announcement that ought to arrive with a drum roll, but in reality, it arrived after a long stretch of sitting at my computer wondering what I'd got myself into.

I realise a book called I Wonder: Notes on Spirituality without the Supernatural might look out of place on a walking website. If the word "spirituality" makes you want to hit the back button, I completely get it. I'd usually be right behind you. But stay with me for one more paragraph.

The connection, besides me writing it, is that the mountains are where I feel awe more reliably than anywhere else. If you have ever stood on a summit, watched the valley drop away beneath you, and felt a sudden sense that you are very small, the world is very large, and that this is somehow excellent news, then this book is about you, whatever you believe.

This isn't a religious book. There is no God in it, no doctrine, and nothing you're asked to take on faith, but it doesn't dismiss faith either. My view is that religion was humanity's first brilliant attempt to navigate these profound moments, spending centuries refining traditions and practices that reliably invoke them. As someone with a physics degree and a deep suspicion of anything that can't be tested, I wanted an empirical look at those feelings of transcendence. It turns out neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers have been quietly studying them for decades, alongside flow, meditation, meaning, and joy.

I Wonder is simply what I found when I went looking.