Awe

In the grief that followed, I would regularly jolt awake before dawn, gasping. My body ran hot. I ached physically. I dreamed dreams unlike anything I’d experienced before. In one, I was walking up a dark, winding dirt road to an illuminated Victorian that resembled our childhood home in Penryn. Rolf burst around a corner in yellow shorts, running in his high school miler strides. He stopped, smiled, waved, and moved his lips, uttering words he knew I could no longer hear. I experienced the hallucinations that Joan Didion describes in The Year of Magical Thinking. I saw the outline of Rolf’s face in the shifting boundaries of neighboring clouds. On one walk on the Berkeley campus, I saw his chemo-exhausted eyes in the spiraling bark of a redwood tree. I heard his voice in the rustling of leaves, his sigh in the wind. On two occasions I was so convinced I had seen him that I followed strangers whose shoulders, foreheads, freckles, and jawlines looked like his.

Our minds are relational: we see life patterns through our shared experiences with others, sense life’s significant themes in the sounds of others’ voices, and feel embraced in things larger than the self through others’ touch. I saw the wonders of the world through Rolf’s eyes. With his passing, I felt aweless. And my companion in awe was no longer around to help me make sense of the vastest mystery I had encountered in my fifty-seven years of living.

A loud voice called out:

FIND AWE.

Knowing of awe’s many benefits, and that we can find it all around us, I went in search of awe. I took a moment each day to be open to the awe-inspiring around me. I sought out places of importance in the history of awe. I engaged in open-ended conversations with people I consider awe pioneers. I immersed myself as a newcomer in various wonders of life. These explorations led to personal experiences, memories, dreams, and insights that helped me make sense of losing my brother. They brought me to the conviction that awe is almost always nearby, and is a pathway to healing and growing in the face of the losses and traumas that are part of life.

There are four stories of awe, then, for us to consider together—the scientific, the personal, the cultural, and one about the growth that awe can bring us when we face hardship, uncertainty, loss, and the unknown. I have organized this book accordingly. The first three chapters traverse the scientific story of awe. We consider what awe is, the contexts in which it arises, how it differs from fear and beauty, and how it feels in our everyday lives (chapter 1). We follow how awe transforms our sense of self, our thought, and our relation to the world (chapter 2). And we take an evolutionary journey back in time to ask: Why awe? Jane Goodall, a hero of mine, believed that chimpanzees feel awe and have a sense of spirituality grounded in a capacity Goodall describes as being amazed at things outside yourself. Animated by this mystery, we will investigate where our chills, tears, wide-open eyes and mouths, and wows and whoas come from in our mammalian evolution, and what this tells us about the primordial meaning of awe (chapter 3).

In the second section of the book, we turn to personal stories of awe. We will hear stories about the transcendent power of others’ moral beauty and its place in prisons and more life-enhancing institutions like libraries and hospitals (chapter 4). About finding collective effervescence in ecstatic dance and professional basketball and in the collective movements of our daily lives (chapter 5). About nature and how it can help heal the traumas of combat, loneliness, and poverty (chapter 6).

The third section shifts to a treatment of how culture archives awe in different forms. We will consider the place of awe in music (chapter 7), visual art (chapter 8), and religion and spirituality (chapter 9). These are large tasks indeed but illuminating once we narrow in on the place of awe in these creative forms of culture.

The last section of the book returns to how awe helps us grow when we face loss and trauma, and more generally when we face the unknowns and uncertainties of life. It was striking for me to learn how central awe is in how we grapple with life and death and their ever-repeating, species-shaping cycle (chapter 10). And how across the eight wonders of life, awe reveals big insights to us about the point of our lives in our continual search for meaning (chapter 11).

In teaching happiness for more than twenty years, I have seen how much health and well-being we gain by being amazed at things outside ourselves. By finding awe. From our first breath to our last, awe moves us to deepen our relations with the wonders of life and to marvel at the vast mysteries that are part of our fleeting time here, guided by this most human of emotions.

SECTION I

• • • A Science of Awe