Making Space for Awe

Research is showing that human beings are built for “awe.”  Like other spiritual gifts, awe is not a thing you can grasp at.  This article explores the ways you can slow down so that awe can graciously catch up with you.

This article was first published in SMC on 8/4/2024. It describes what happened on a Mother’s Day trip last year to Missouri’s breath-taking Current River.  It provided a lens for me to reflect upon some recent research in the topic of “Awe.”  Thanks for reading! - Tom

My wife’s birthday, and Mother’s Day live just a stone’s throw apart on the family calendar.  This year, I decided to pay attention to what happiness research has to say about gift-giving...

Rather than having her unwrap more stuff (that she’ll more likely than not return anyway), I gave her, and by association, me…an experience.  As you may know, we live in Saint Louis, Missouri.  Planning a drive-able summer vacation on a budget normally means heading north to humidity-free Michigan for sandy beaches and cherry pie.  With only three and a half days to spend, I shortened my search to nearby zip codes.  We ended up selecting a float trip on Missouri’s spring-fed Current River, just three-hours away.  For me, this represented a return to the place where, many decades ago, I experienced something very close to what Professor Dacher Keltner refers to as “Awe."

My childhood trip to that river occurred in the late summer.  With little rain that time of year, its mostly just ice cold springs that feed it.  Revisiting it with Lisa, in mid-May, the river hid itself beneath a layer of brown makeup.  Just one week earlier, torrential spring rains swole that river’s muscles.  It burst its banks.  Pulled up trees.  It gorged itself on tons of riverbank mud.  By the time we got there, it had settled down.  On the plus side, all that rain made the current stronger.  Paddling was a breeze!  On the minus side, those normally crystalline waters, bore a strange resemblance to a McDonald’s chocolate milkshake.  But that’s not how it was back in July of 1973. 

Somehow, our two adult chaperones managed to pry six school-aged boys from their tents pretty close to sun-up.  After unloading the outfitter’s bus and boat trailer, we launched ourselves onto a quiet, pristine river.   Right away we noticed the way that the cold spring-fed water interacted with the warm summer’s air.  It was as if nature had borrowed one of those rock concert dry ice machines.  A humid smoke coiled over the surface that we plowed with the bows of our boats.  The morning sun would occasionally peak over one of the limestone cliffs that bound the river.   The effect was breathtaking:  bright columns of light cutting through the smoke gaps.  Those beams opened up an underwater landscape fit for a mermaid.  In the shallows, suckerfish and trout moved in and out of the shadows of our boats. 

Here’s the slice out of that trip Dr. Keltner would want to take to his lab to chop up for examination:  My best pal Dan Jarrio, and I paddled within spitting distance of a fifty-foot high striated limestone cliff.  Just then, a burst of light sliced through the water down into the depths.  It illuminated maybe thirty more underwater feet of that cliff’s base until the dark of the depths swallowed it.  Instantly, a leviathan composed of fear and goodness surged up from some, until now, unknown place inside.  It swallowed me whole.  I am, and always have been, annoyingly loquacious by nature, yet I couldn’t find any words at all for this…not even a desire for them!  In that holy silence, my eyes teared up.  If you could find a word to go with that internal/external experience it’d have to be deeper than “Holy Shit!”  Maybe: “WHOAH” with about a thousand exclamation points!  I remember it with a kind of pleasant ache…like I wish I could get back there. 

In his book coincidentally titled, Awe, Dr. Dacher Keltner writes, “Twenty years into teaching happiness, I found the answer, “FIND AWE.”  I wish it were that simple.  As far as I can tell, Keltner’s methodological approach was, and continues to be meticulous.  His book was well worth my fifteen bucks.  However, many times I kept thinking of the work of many adjacent authors who have written about awe from their unique vantage points over the centuries.  William James in the early Twentieth Century  studied “religious experiences.”  Abraham Maslow in the mid-Twentieth Century researched “peak experiences.”  Theresa of Avilla wrote about mystical experiences in the late Sixteenth Century.  These authors spread out across the centuries agreed with one another on several substantial points.  One of those being that you can’t schedule an experience of Awe.  To be fair, Keltner doesn’t disagree with that point either.  So what can you do?

You can do what Lisa and I did on our trip to the Current River in mid-May.  As we rounded bends in the river, explored water caves, greeted the dawn, and said goodbye to the setting sun, we did our Beauty Checks.  This methodology was discovered in my own resilience/happiness research.  It involves two-steps. 

1. First, there is the noticing of beauty in your surroundings. 

2. Next, you point it out to your partner or pals which gives way to a quiet moment where you, Stop. Drop. And Savor, making a point to feel the beauty within your body.

There is no formula for scheduling an experience of Awe.  To put it into a religious frame, C.S. Lewis once said that “[God] is not tame like that.”  What you can schedule, at any given time is to rigorously practice the sacred art of Beauty.  If you regularly practice your Beauty Checks, and Stop, Drop, and Savor, you will develop your innate capacity for wonder.  In exercising wonder more and more frequently, you will have provided a container for the “happy accident” (Thomas Keating) of Awe to land at the time and place of her choosing. 

Dialogue and Discussion Questions: 

Longtime SMC readers know that “the Dialogue” section of this article is set aside for a good conversation over a cup of coffee—with a friend, with a group, or just with yourself!  As always, feel free to share your reaction or reflection in the “Comments” section below.  Last week, ten of you chimed in!  Thank you. 

• Recall several times when you had an embodied experience of Beauty.  Write and tell that story with as much internal and external detail as possible.

• Do you have a regular discipline of Beauty Checks?  For example, do you have an outdoor spot for meditation where the same tree’s unfolding “personality” over the seasons intrigues and delights you?  Where do you go to see the sunrise?  Where do you go to enjoy a sunset? 

• Last year I watched a woman get horrible news on her phone at the airport while in line at the TSA.  As she wept and wailed, her toddler boy tugged and cried.  She took time out from her call to jerk him by the arm, and scream at him, causing him to cry harder.  She went back to her phone weeping.  So painfully horrible!  But next came the Beauty.  A woman stepped out of line and helped by lifting this woman’s luggage onto the conveyer, and did her best to soothe both mom and boy.  Have you encountered this kind of Beauty in a grocery store, in an airport, or a community center?

• Does it occur to you to do your Beauty Checks by savoring a parent or grandparent delighting in a child?  Similarly, do you Stop Drop and Savor when you observe Beauty manifested in kindness or generosity?   

• Have you experienced Awe before?  Write or tell the story.     

Please share with the SMC community your thoughts and/or reflections in the comments below.