Awe

As Rolf’s colon cancer reduced his body from a broad-shouldered 210 pounds to a frail, starving 145, the future of his life was increasingly clear. And so I sought to look to the past, to distill the story of our brotherhood.

On my second-to-last visit with Rolf, about ten days before he passed, we took in 1,372 photos from the fifteen years our family had been together before our parents divorced. They were mostly black-and-white slides tucked away in small, yellowing cardboard boxes. They hadn’t been looked at for years. They dated from 1963—our shared baby years in Mexico—to 1978, our last days as an intact family in England.

Rolf, my mom, and I looked over the photos, proceeding year by year. From the early 1960s: photos of us held aloft in our young parents’ arms as babies, cheeks pressing into cheeks, adult hands cupping fuzzy heads. Slides from the late 1960s chronicled our Laurel Canyon years and wandering summer vacations in our blue Volkswagen bus. Peering out of tents in the Rockies, surrounded by aspens. Climbing down rocky, wild coastal cliffs off Highway 1 near Mendocino, California. At art shows of my dad’s. Late ’60s music festivals and renaissance fairs and Fourth of July communal celebrations in the mountains. Long-haired collective effervescence everywhere.

The 1970s brought a move to the foothills of Northern California, a new VW bus, and a Huck Finn–like freedom of early adolescence on our five acres with a pond. Shooting hoops on the basketball court my dad had built in a star-thistly pasture. Inner tubing and rafting down rivers. A bicentennial trip across the United States in 1976—vast plains of cornfields out the windows of the bus, my brother and I spoofing and mugging at Monticello.

And then our last year as an intact family, on our way to England, where our parents would part ways. Rolf and I at revered sites—the Alhambra, the Louvre, and Notre Dame—as teens, sneering and mocking, and on occasion solemn and moved.

As we looked at the slides, Rolf drifted in and out, and with an inviting finger asked for more. Before finally falling into a deep sleep, he observed: “We had fun.”

Fun, like awe, is one of several self-transcendent states, a space of emotions that transport us out of our self-focused, threat-oriented, and status quo mindset to a realm where we connect to something larger than the self. Joy, the feeling of being free, for the moment, of worldly concerns, is part of this space, as is ecstasy (or bliss), when we sense ourself to dissolve completely (in awe we remain aware, although faintly, of our selves). And fun, the mirth and lighthearted delight we feel when imagining alternative perspectives upon our mundane lives we so often take too seriously.

Gratitude is part of this transcendent realm of feeling, the reverence we feel for the gifts of life. I felt it acutely that day amid waves of sadness and anxiety, surveying those 1,372 slides. My parents had allowed my brother and me to wander, locating us in a world of wonders. Rolf and I had lived a brotherhood of awe.

Knowing now a bit more about the what of awe, where we find it, how it feels, and how it is part of a broader space of transcendent states, it is time to turn to how awe works. How does awe transform our minds, our sense of self, and our way of being in the world?

TWO AWE INSIDE OUT How Awe Transforms Our Relation to the World

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science.

• ALBERT EINSTEIN

A sense of wonder so indestructible it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strengths.

• RACHEL CARSON

On a bustling day in 2010, I was working in my office when I received a call from Pete Docter, whose film Up had just won an Academy Award. He was calling to ask if I would talk with his team about his next film. The main characters, he continued, would be five emotions inside the mind of Riley, an eleven-year-old girl. The film was tentatively titled Inside Out.