A call for awe and wonder
This morning, with a little more time than usual to dally, I read the Sunday New York Times and even got around to opening my Brain Pickings email (which I usually feel obliged to pass over in favor of the more practical stuff). In a coincidence that gave me pause-- hence this blog post, the first in a long while-- two things I read seemed very much to arrive at the same point: we urgently need more experiences of awe and wonder in our lives.
The NY Times piece by Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner, research psychologists at UC Irvine and UC Berkeley, respectively, drew on their abundant and quite imaginative studies on how moments of awe, and the quantity of them in a person’s life, increases collective-mindedness and prosocial behavior. Their experiments involved, for example, having subjects spend a minute looking at spectacular, 200-foot tall blue gum trees and then have a (secretly staged) encounter with a person dropping a bunch of pens as they walked by. The researchers found that just that one-minute experience of being drawn out of one’s self and impressed by the outside world led to more helpfulness toward the stranger (= picking up more of their fallen pens). The take-away for them, and their urge for us as readers, is that “people insist on experiencing more everyday awe, to actively seek out what gives them goose bumps, be it in looking at trees, night skies, patterns of wind on water or the quotidian nobility of others — the teenage punk who gives up his seat on public transportation, the young child who explores the world in a state of wonder, the person who presses on against all odds.”
Then, I was struck while reading Maria Popova’s beautiful review in Brain Pickings of Oliver Sacks’ new memoir, “On the Move,” by her observation of this very awe-seeking (or awe-attuned?) quality in Dr. Sacks. She quotes a passage from the book where Sacks describes stopping passersby on the street who were unaware of the rare lunar eclipse he was privately observing through his telescope. “Look! Look what’s happening to the moon!” he recalls imploring them, “and pressing my telescope into their hands.” Popova observes, "in a sense, Dr. Sacks has spent half a century pushing a telescope into our hands and inviting us, with the same innocent and infectious enthusiasm, to peer into an object even more remote and mysterious –the human mindscape – until we wow.” Personally, I can’t think of a greater gift, especially when such knowledge can be presented in an illuminating way to the wide world of non-academic readers, as Sacks has done through his writings.
All this leaves me with a strong feeling, first of all, to sharpen my eyes and open my mind-- constrained as it feels these days by the ‘shoulds’ and the ‘musts’ of my graduate studies in clinical psychology and the imperatives of income-earning and future-building (which to some degree fall into Piff and Keltner’s area of concern: our growing self-focus). But also, it brought me back to this blog, which was based, originally, on quite the same notion: “seeking out surprises,” as the subtitle goes. I am grateful to the writers I read today for reminding me of this crucial aspect of being truly alive, which I have so often felt while watching a stirring performance or listening to exquisite music, and absolutely while observing children and strangers in those tiny, private, but spectacular moments of daily life. I recommit myself today to that practice of observation, and hope this post and this blog will be a small reminder to us all to stay awake in that way.
*Photo above: my inspiring, 90 year-old grandmother pausing to take in the hilltop view of Hermanus Bay, South Africa.
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