WICHITA, Kan. – From my fourth-floor hotel window here, I can see a freight train – pregnant with meaning – rolling through the edge of downtown. What an ordinary thing. But how often we miss the meanings and possibilities of ordinary things because we forget that, in fact, almost everything is pregnant with meaning.

This train carries several white tank cars. I don’t know what’s in them. I’m not a train expert. Maybe they carry oil. Maybe propane. Something somebody needs is in those cars, something somebody is selling to somebody else, something that makes life go here in energy-intensive America.

I can’t explain how we fail to see what’s going on around us. We just quit seeing with new eyes. I remember times and places I’ve gotten used to and, when that’s happened, I’ve quit seeing what’s in front of me, quit thinking about meaning.

I’ve never before stayed a night in downtown Wichita. So I’ve never seen what I am seeing out the window of my room in the Hotel at Old Town. Part of what I see is the freight train sliding between brick buildings, the train of white tank cars moving like slow, fat bullets.

And here’s where that sight takes me: I wonder where the train finally is headed, where it came from and who is driving it. What time did the engineer get up this morning and where is that engineer’s home? Who will unload the train and whose home will the propane on the train, if that’s what it was, heat? Who laid these tracks and what railroad baron got rich on the sweaty oil of the track layers’ exertion?

Why do we miss these questions inherent in so much of what we see every day? Why do we reserve these questions only for the unusual scenes or for the obvious monuments in the world?

Not lot ago, I spent a few days wandering about Washington with one of my daughters. One of our stops was at the relatively new Korean War Memorial. I had not seen it before, so questions, meaning and memories exploded in my mind.

I remembered – and told my daughter about – a headline from a 1953 Weekly Reader: “War Ends in Korea.” I wondered who each of the statue soldiers in the memorial was or was meant to represent. I imagined Harry Truman standing here with us, recounting the hard decisions he had to make when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950.

We too often are like one-dimensional viewers of the world. We see only the surface of what’s in front of us, if that, and rarely the layers and layers of questions and meaning beneath that surface. I’m not suggesting that there’s cosmic meaning in every box car, every street light. But almost.

I think of Superman’s X-ray vision – his fabled cartoon ability to peer beneath the top onion skin covering the world and see the reality hidden there. In many ways, we have a similar capacity. With our curiosity, we can strip away the paint the world shows us and see the wood under it if only we would quit imagining that the paint is the only – or the

most interesting – thing to see.

I’m at a writing conference here in Wichita, and a few hours after I watched the freight train roll past I heard one of our speakers urge journalists to sharpen their senses of curiosity.

It’s a point I once made in a speech to a graduating class of journalists at my alma mater. I told them to read a book every few weeks on a subject they know nothing about. It’s a wonderful habit for journalists, who must try to make sense of a complex, interconnected world. But it’s not bad advice for everyone else, too. For it’s only when we are curious and ask skeptical questions that we begin to understand public policy and family dynamics, global trends and what drives our neighbors.

A Jewish prayer book I’ve quoted in this space before says that “we walk sightless among miracles.” That’s true, but things are worse than that. We also walk sightless among everyday, non-miraculous events and fail even to question what’s going on.

I would be an explorer, a rider of rails, a sailor on strange and familiar seas. When my circumstances prevent me from hopping a freight train clunk-clunking through Wichita, I can at least require my mind to wonder about it. And so can you.

Bill Tammeus is an editorial page columnist for The Kansas City Star.