Reading to practice awe, wonder in everyday life
We’re just leaving the month that is both fake winter and fake spring. While snowstorms left a lot of people without power, the tulips began popping.
To me, it’s always the toughest time of year in upstate New York, and I tend to flee. This month, a daughter and I drove down to Georgia to visit family with a quick stop in Washington, D.C. Driving home, we encountered a slush pile or two at a rest stop in Rockland County and then more snow as we made our way up the Hudson Valley to Albany. After seeing blossomed magnolia trees in D.C. and eastern redbuds in Georgia, it was a tough return to winter.
But today as I finish writing this, the sun is brilliant, the sky is blue and it’s the first official day of spring. Already awe-inspiring.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how I was eschewing self-help books because, well, they’re ridiculous. I’m gravitating more toward nonfiction urging readers to seek out delight and enchantment, and I seem to be on trend.
I heard Dacher Keltner on the excellent “On Being” podcast talk about his book, “Awe: the New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life,” so I requested a copy.
Keltner defines awe as “being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.” He collected stories fitting that description and grouped them into eight categories.
One of those is “collective effervescence,” a term coined to describe the feeling people get when worshiping or celebrating together, like at a wedding. Others include moral beauty (like virtue), nature, music, religion, visual design, epiphany, and life and death (awe can also happen during sad events).
“Every experience of awe you enjoy today links you to the past, to others’ experiences of the sublime and how they made sense of them within the ever-evolving cultural forms that archive the wonders of life,” he writes.
Keltner also talks about his “awe walk” experiments, in which participants, all older than 75, were instructed to tap into their “childlike sense of wonder.” He writes, “Over time the positive emotions generated by the awe walk led our elderly participants to feel less anxiety and depression, and to smile with greater joy.”
Awe factors in Katherine May’s new book, “Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in An Anxious Age.” Her book, “Wintering,” registered deeply with many during the pandemic as we shut ourselves up in our homes. Now, as we venture outside and reconnect, this new book comes at a perfect time.May defines enchantment as “small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homeopathic: those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them.”
It’s true. You do have to look for them. And I did, while on my vacation, from the budding trees to a collection of old cameras in a coffee shop south of Atlanta.
May taps into old childhood memories: “the drift of headlights that inched along my quilt as I lay in bed in my grandparents’ spare bedroom . ... I knew that this was not technically beautiful, but I found magic in the way that the outside world could ghost through my room.”She divides her book into the four elements of nature: Earth, Fire, Water and Air.
“Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention,” she writes.
Jenny Odell also has a new book about how we spend our lives. “How to Do Nothing” also helped a lot of people during the pandemic, including myself. I picked up “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock” while on vacation just after daylight saving time. Not governed by meetings or deadlines, time seemed slippery. I also forgot to change my car clock, which further muddled me. Odell starts each chapter with part of a drive. Each time we stopped during our own road trip to and from Georgia, our GPS app added a few minutes to our arrival time, stretching the future – and the amount of time we spent in the car. Time grew elastic, but not in an unpleasant way.
Before the start of our trip south, a lot was going on. I left things unfinished (including this column) and had a sense of dread that upon returning I’d be just as overwhelmed. But here I am on the first day of spring. The trip and these books helped.
I’m still making my way through Odell’s book, but here’s a line from the introduction that propelled me to read more: “I believe a real meditation on the nature of time, unbound from its capitalist incarnation, shows that neither our lives nor the life of the planet is a foregone conclusion.”