Awe

I have taught happiness to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. It is not obvious why I ended up doing this work: I have been a pretty wound-up, anxious person for significant chunks of my life and was thrown out of my first meditation class (for laughing while we chanted “I am a being of purple fire”). Life can surprise us, though, in giving us the work we are here to do. So nearly every day in classrooms of different kinds, from kindergarten circle rugs to lecture halls in Berkeley, from the apses of churches to inside prisons, from sterile conference rooms in hospitals to gatherings in nature, I’ve taught people about finding the good life.

What we are seeking in such inquiry is an answer to a perennial question, one we have been asking in different ways for tens of thousands of years: How can we live the good life? One enlivened by joy and community and meaning, that brings us a sense of worth and belonging and strengthens the people and natural environments around us? Now, twenty years into teaching happiness, I have an answer:

FIND AWE.

Awe is the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand. Why would I recommend that you find happiness in an emotion that is so fleeting and evanescent? A feeling so elusive that it resists simple description? That requires the unexpected, and moves us toward mystery and the unknown rather than what is certain and easy?

Because we can find awe anywhere. Because doing so doesn’t require money or the burning of fossil fuels—or even much time. Our research suggests that just a couple of minutes a day will do. Because we have a basic need for awe wired into our brains and bodies, finding awe is easy if we just take a moment and wonder. Because all of us, no matter what our background, can find our own meaningful path to awe. Because brief moments of awe are as good for your mind and body as anything you might do.

My hope for you in reading this book is simple—it is that you will find more awe.

In the service of this aim, I will need to tell you four stories.

The first is the new science of awe. In ways I am beginning to understand, I was raised to study awe with the tools of science. My mom taught poetry and literature at a large public university, and in how she lived her life she taught me about the wisdom of the passions and to speak truth to power. My dad painted in the horrifying and beautiful style of Francisco Goya and Francis Bacon and suggested that life is about seeking the Tao with your Zen mind, beginner’s mind. I grew up in wild Laurel Canyon, California, in the late 1960s, with the Doors and Joni Mitchell as neighbors, and then in the hardscrabble foothills of the Sierras, where a poor, rural wildness prevailed. The soaring ideas of the times—civil rights, antiwar protests, women’s rights, sexual and artistic revolution, Watergate—filled the conversations at our dinner table and posters on the walls of our home.

I spent unusual amounts of time as a child looking at art and hearing about great scenes and characters in novels, poems, paintings, and films. But I showed no early talents, to my chagrin, for literary analysis or writing fiction, nor painting or drawing, for that matter. Instead, I was awestruck by dinosaurs, natural history museums, sports statistics, basketball, the Beatles, the biological life of ponds and creeks, and being near mountains, rivers, and wide-open, star-filled skies. Given the passion-filled home and the passionate era I was raised in, I guess it makes sense that I would devote my career to mapping emotions with science, first at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and then at University of California, Berkeley.

Early in my career, I spent hundreds of hours in a basement lab discerning in frame-by-frame video analysis the expressions of embarrassment and shame—fitting for the paranoid young professor that I was. With the arrival of two daughters and the delights of family life filling my days, I would turn to the wonders of laughter, how we express love in the face and body, the vocalizations and physiological patterns of compassion, and how with simple acts of touch we can express gratitude. This work was animated by the thesis that emotions like compassion, gratitude, and love are the glue of social relations, which I summarized in my book Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life.

What about awe, though? Is awe a fundamental emotion, a universal core to who we are, like fear, anger, or joy? How would one study awe scientifically? Measure feelings that seem beyond words? Could we bring awe, so mysterious in how it arises, reliably into the lab?