On Awe
Instantaneous, Manufactured, and Necessary
A few weeks ago, driving to SF from the Contrary Capital retreat in Lake Tahoe, I saw several rainbows, one after the other. Rainbows elicit awe, but so do their quick succession. This type of awe is of the instantaneous variety.
Instantaneous-awe requires no training, no developed reflex. This breed of awe, as David Foster Wallace might put it, "bypasses conscious thought."
Our childhood is filled with moments of instantaneous-awe. It makes sense why; awe is some combination of rarity and that which sits just beyond what we are able to wrap our head around. To the child, all is new and unfamiliar.
In older age, the feeling of instantaneous-awe seems to hit us less. I don't think it's an inevitability. Each new life stage, I'm sure, brings it with some new awe. In our 30s, having kids is a point of awe. In our 80s, looking at a photo of our childhood selves, maybe we're in awe of the non-consensual passage of time.
But, on the whole, awe is seldom experienced with the passing of time. Reality becomes increasingly consistent and designed - we marry, we settle down, we live in the same place and around the same people, we stay at our job for longer. Life becomes mundane (this may well be an okay thing), unless we actively push for it to be something different. We become more stubborn, less open to what is beyond our conception. Our energy plummets, and as others rely on us, so does our tolerance for risk. With less risk – with more normalcy – we starve awe out.
As we age, we wrestle with the monotony. Bill Henderson, In Tower - Faith, Vertigo, and Amateur Construction, reminds of this.
"I was emptied out. And my daughter was no longer a child; our baby didn’t need her dad as much anymore. Memoir finished, baby gone, I felt hollow inside. Restless. Perhaps more depressed than I realized"
So, in search for awe, Henderson builds a tower. A wholly pointless, anti-utilitarian tower – to find wonder in the non-instrumental. He writes a book on it. Life converges on the instrumental, on the stuff that has to get done. Our lack of awe introduces us to an uncomfortable strain of sadness (it’s partly why the mid-life crisis we all jokingly refer to, perhaps comes to be accurately describing of things). And so, therein lies a feeling to revisit the state of childhood - the things we do for play and out of our unreasonable curiosity.
For others (Henderson could be included in this, for some time at least), I'm convinced this is why many become religious, or hold onto their religiosity. Religion is a reintroduction to awe - to something beyond us, which paradoxically grounds us. We take pleasure in the explained unexplainable, because the world weighs less on us.
There are less invasive ways, though, to reintroduce awe into one's life (not to suggest that religion only accomplishes this).
Manufactured Awe
Another type of awe is manufactured awe – the awe you got to work for (and in turn, it'll work for you).
Walking in NYC, after growing up here, it is easy to walk street after street without much thought to all that surrounds. But it really is incredible. The streets, the signs, the cars, the fashion, the skyscrapers…
I tweeted something to this effect a few months ago.
In this way, the world becomes strikingly loud and intense. I raise my chin and look up at the swath of skyscrapers, which are made possible by the Otis Elevator (before which buildings rarely exceeded a more than handful of floors ), the innumerable decisions of thousands of people, and the effort of thousands more who toiled to construct it. I am at a loss for how all that is here, is here, and the collective genius that gave rise to it. Every bit of the environment, natural and built, imbued with the energy of unbound time, made possible by the messiness of natural selection and the web of purposeful, artistic, creative choices. Ecstasy, in its near-most intense form.
This type of awe, living as the outgrowth of an individual’s ability to warp time, is as potent as any other type. It is borne out of knowledge, yes, but also a willingness to let your neat, sorted world become the beautiful, kinetic thing it is. To let it be colored by the knowledge of the complexity and history that surrounds us.
Just as a great athlete develops their "kinesthetic sense" through regimented practice, manufactured awe too can be practiced; it is fast becoming the primary type of awe I experience. Though, at some unknown point in time, I believe the manufactured converts to the instantaneous, allowing for more of this beautifully intense feeling.
What is less clear to me, still, is whether knowledge and experience generally derails or enables awe. Generally speaking, instantaneous awe seems inversely related to one’s age (read: knowledge), whereas manufactured awe seems directly proportional to it.
Knowledge and Awe
If the feeling of awe diminishes as we age, it might suggest that knowledge and experience are at fault here. But I'm not quite sure. To experience the manufactured-awe of walking around a city, you are surely served by some knowledge of things. Though, a better example might be the physicist (at least some physicists), who in understanding the dimensionality of time, finds awe in a richer perceptual experience of reality.
Conversely, take a magic show, whereby the kid is in awe of the bunny being pulled from the hat, but the parent, knowing how things are done (or maybe just, even in the absence of knowing how things are done, knows that something is being done), is unenthused.
What does seem clear though, is that if our environments are consistent over some extended time (ie familiarity with x), then we have to (read: "should") manufacture our awe.
I think this says something about being vs. witnessing.
Witnessing vs. Being
Awe lives in the space between the self and something else. We feel awe in witnessing, not in being. Think about the use of awe in our speaking:
"I'm in awe of their accomplishment"
"I'm in awe of a place like Harvard"
Well, our awe degrades at the point at which we engage with it. We don't really feel awe in relation to our own accomplishments; we see all the texture of what contributed to it – work, patience, or the like. And I haven't really talked with many Harvard students who still possess awe after they've spent some time on campus.
[Riley comments that occasionally, he surprises himself and feels some type of awe. Worth thinking about more]
Federer experiences this in tennis; when he plays, he is not seriously attuned to the speed of the ball. Or, to correct myself - he's developed a "kinesthetic sense" for it, so his body and extensions to the body (ie the racket) reacts to varying speeds, but he directs his attention to just the ball. But, in being a spectator to a game of tennis, he is in awe of the ball's breakneck speed.1
I'm reminded of the expression "never meet your idols," because one's prior awe will not withstand encountering the raw reality. We are in awe of others precisely because we do not know, but only witness, them. We witness unimaginable qualities in someone or something, which therein opens the door for awe.
There is probably some commentary to be had here about the proliferation of television, mass entertainment, and micro-celebrities. The distance between ourselves and these people, the attribution of genius, and so on. This type of instantaneous awe, that being awe of people, versus, let's say, awe of a sunset, seems a bit different. In looking at a person, they serve as a mirror unto ourselves. Both similar and far off, grounded in our similarities and astounded by the differences, they serve as an unflinching source of inspiration (that is, until we meet them).
On Wonder
I was inclined, at various moments in writing, to use "wonder" > "awe," and so I feel similarly inclined to, briefly, toy out their differences.
My immediate intuition is wonder is a sort of an outcrop of awe. Awe is the passive precursor to the active "wonder". We feel awe and so we wonder. We wonder what could be, and where we could be, and who we are in this unfathomably large cosmos. To wonder is to question.
With wonder, our curiosity spills unto possibility, and possibility unto optimism.
If there is a kernel of reason for writing this, it’s the excitement at awe's ability to cascade into wonder and more.
In broad strokes, I'll paint what I think it can cascade into below.
A Call to Awe
1. The Past and Present
Awe suggests to us that we should lean into the world, the natural and the built.
If we similarly lean into the built world, we can be thrilled by our present environment and what we've accomplished, rather than feel contempt for it. Too, we can engender excitement about where we can go and what the collective effort of people can erect.
2. The Frontier
Awe is a primary stimulant for curiosity, which begets progress. It reinstates our acknowledgement of the expanse, in both the grandness of things and itti-bittiness of ourselves. In experiencing awe, and the wonder that can follow, we're invited to explore the edges of our knowledge.
Awe removes us from the day to day grumblings and enables us to engage in timescales separate from those that we naturally encounter. As such, we engage in significant and great pursuits, not just those our present time scale suggests to us.
3. Collaboration
In experiencing awe – in the face of the unknown – we bind together; our prosocial behaviors emerge atop of our otherwise materialistic and individualistic substrate. In taming our self indulgence, and stitching ourselves into the collective fabric of society, maybe we'll direct our efforts to the wellbeing of others.
I don't have some grand, or profound ending to this. My worry in publishing is that I become accustomed to selling. Even reading over the many words that make up this writing, I feel guilty of this; did I really engage in the messy and genuine investigation, or did I opt for something I believe to be more palatable? Maybe it’s a visceral reaction of departing from my offhand, private journals. All said, here are some final thoughts on awe:
Finding or creating moments of awe is, at the level of personal and collective wellbeing, of incredible importance.
To build a vibrant future, to push back on our general malaise, we need to lean into our past and present. We need to lean into others, because invention is the outgrowth of our collective genius.
To engender this awe, look out unto the world.
"Remember to look up at the stars" - Stephen Hawking
But don't believe, for a moment, that awe is only to be found looking up. Our awe is to be found in all that surrounds us.
“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” - Franz Kafka
Some thoughts on writing
I think this piece is as much forcing me to direct energy towards output. For I feel a bit imposter-ish if I say I "write" but do not publish; an imposter, not in how others perceive but in how I relate to myself. This is an effort in "bearing the fruit" of the labor I much profess to do privately. A chef may cook because he likes to experiment, to find some truth in the interplay of ingredients. But, what is a chef if not for some food that they share with others? Similarly, I do not see published writing as why I write, but proof to myself that I can grow into being a writer (A single writing, to be clear, does not make a writer, just as a single dish says little as to whether someone is a chef).
Publicizing my writing is among the most forceful actions I can take to ensure I engage with my ideas to a considerable degree. And, publishing often, removes the obscene pressure that publishing infrequently generates (for if I publish often, there is less expectation that it be consistently good, but the same is less true of the infrequent publisher).
Thanks to the folks who took a read-through and helped to edit this: Riley, Anson, Juliet, Andrew, and Josh
Wallace, D. F. (2013). Both flesh and not: Essays. Penguin Books.
Beautiful writing, thanks for sharing!
such an inspiring piece💓