The wizardry of awe

THERE WAS a time, some years ago, when I told the quotidian to go take a hike and I went the opposite way. My career was on track but I was stuck spiritually. So I fit all my possessions in one bag and off I went with no itinerary.

During that dark moment in my life, I remembered how, as a boy living in a happy but isolated home surrounded by fields of rice and mango groves, I embraced the pitch-black evenings, looking to the heavens and going to bed every night assured in the knowledge that the dippers and their other heavenly friends, always reliably present, would be there the next night.

As I started my travels which lasted 14 months, I made an attempt at a blog that I titled “In Search of Starry Nights—A Vagabond Life for a Year.”  And starry nights I did find, like those nights from my childhood, many of them in fact, in the deserts of Tibet and the savannahs of Africa, in the beaches of Bahia and the mountain trails of Peru, in the middle of the Red Sea and the dried-up lake of Salar de Uyuni.

But I discovered so much more. There is only one word that could capture my life in that year: awe. Awe at the vastness of the heavens and my insignificance in comparison, awe at the incomprehensible beauty of the world and the diversity of life, awe at the common bond of kindness among our species.

What is awe? Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, says it is “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.” There are places in the world—think Machu Picchu or the Grand Canyon, or, closer to home, El Nido and the waters of Anilao, Batangas—that could, without even trying, capture the essence of awe. Some call them thin places, “locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we are able to catch glimpses of the divine or the transcendent.”

A few weeks ago, I went to a retreat led by philosopher Charles Eisenstein, who has written books with such titles as “The Ascent of Humanity” and “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.” I particularly needed at that moment a communion with people who still believe in the fundamental goodness of humanity after a particularly savage week of being bombarded by Donald Trump’s filth and the failures of kindness in many parts of the world. Eisenstein’s theory is that humankind is discovering its inter-being, a term I first encountered from Buddhist authors—i.e., that “we are fundamentally unseparate from each other, from all beings, and from the universe.” Awesome.

During one of my recent runs at Central Park (which happens to be one of my thin places), I tuned in to Krista Tippett’s podcast “On Being.” It was an episode in which she was interviewing Frank Wilczek, an MIT professor who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2004. Wilczek wrote a book titled “A Beautiful Question,” which Tippett describes as a “joyful meditation on the question ‘Does the world embody beautiful ideas?’, probing the world, by way of science, as a work of art.”

When I encounter people like Wilczek and Eisenstein (whose house in Princeton Wilczek lived in years after the great man died), so steeped in the real, the tangible and quantifiable, talk about an abstract concept like beauty as being central to their work, it just about kills me. As Tippett noted, she knows of no category of people who have a deeper reverence for beauty than those who work with mathematics. To me, that these mathematicians—whose life’s work is making sense, through equations, of the world we live in—find beauty as a real concept, is a source of boundless hope.

What scientists are discovering, through social experiments with people, is that awe seems to foster kindness and altruism. They theorize that being in the presence of vast things calls forth a more modest, less narcissistic self, which enables greater compassion toward others.

The good news is that experiencing awe does not require one to travel far. Awe can be found in the quotidian. When one becomes mindful of one’s experiences, one realizes there is awe to be found everywhere—a toddler offering his biscuit without being prodded, a neighbor narrating the story of two baby hawks being born in a fire escape in the neighboring building, an exquisite sunset. It is all around us. We all need more heart like the Tin Woodsman, and we don’t need a wizard to give it to us. Our hearts can grow just by being more mindful of the presence of awe and beauty everywhere.

Joel Villaseca ([email protected]) is a lawyer living in New York City.