Stillness and Awe

All that we seek but may not have

The Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness

Who can forget the lightshow of March 20, 2003? Baghdad was made to look like the glorious opening of the Wonderful World of Disney show cum 1977, albeit a bit more lethal. That was the penultimate “shock and awe” campaign, which, in my military ignorance, I thought was just a catchy marketing phrase. It turns out, “shock and awe” is an actual military doctrine developed at the National Defense University. It was first presented as such by Harlan Ullman and James Wade in 1996.

Certainly, the Baghdad lightshow was a shock. But awe? I don’t think so. Awe is the polar opposite of what was going on in Baghdad. The bombing of Baghdad—which may have had a laudable goal of killing Saddam Hussein, who was pretty universally considered evil—actually had more to do with pridefulness and swagger.

Awe is more rooted in humility and reverence.

I recently interviewed Dr. Laurie Santos in which we talked about a number of topics, one of which was “awe.” Santos is the Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology at Yale University. The central research question Santos focuses on is: What makes the human mind unique? One particular area of Santos’ work concerns the science of happiness: what does and does not make us happy. To that end, Santos teaches a class at Yale known as Psych 157, Psychology and the Good Life. With one in four Yale students taking the class, it is the most popular class in Yale’s 323-year history.

During our conversation, I described to Santos an experience that I have had many times over the years floating through the Frank Church Wilderness. For the uninitiated, this particular wilderness area in Idaho—sometimes referred to as “the Church”—comprises 2.3 million acres of wild, mountainous, and pristine country. The terrain is as varied as it is spectacular. Spend some time there, isolated from work, the news and noise of daily life, and one begins to understand the power of the natural world. Not to put too fuzzy of a 1960s-era, hippy-dippy point on it, but the scale and beauty of the place washes over you, diminishes any outsized sense of self one might have, and puts you at ease. And, yes, the experience can be euphoric (no drugs involved).

Santos explained to me that awe is at the root of such an experience. “One of the reasons that being in the natural world is so positive for our happiness is that it often induces a complex but interesting emotion when it comes to happiness, which is awe,” Santos said. “Awe is an interesting emotion because it’s not purely positive. Some of these majestic seascapes can make you feel … small. You’re looking at the geology of the world … thinking, ‘I feel tiny, right?’ So, it’s not purely positive. It can make you feel small and make you question big things. It’s a disarming emotion in some ways.

“But studies show that it’s incredibly important for our happiness. And one of the surprising things that happens when you experience awe, whether that’s through nature or through beautiful music or art or even seeing the moral actions of others is that awe makes you feel more connected.”

Santos said this is borne out by studies that a colleague of hers, Dacher Keltner at U.C. Berkeley, has done. Keltner will take people to a beautiful place and then ask them to do a simple survey. They are presented with two circles, one representing them, the other their community, and they are then asked to draw how much they overlap, a sort of Venn diagram exercise.

Santos detailed the results: “So, they do this little survey, and what you find is that when you’re in a moment of experience of awe you put those circles overlapping much more together. It is like you think you and your community are much closer than you would, say, if I took you to some other tourist attraction—the Mall of America or something like that.”

Perhaps where I diverge a bit from Santos, and the research, is that I find the “feeling small” part is actually comforting. That there is a bigger landscape of life beyond our particular sound and fury is oddly reassuring to me. It’s not just about us, thankfully.

Divining the source of that awe is tricky and, undoubtedly, personal. Awe is often associated with beauty, but I don’t think it’s that. I think beauty is something we are taught; I don’t believe a magnificent vista is biologically, or evolutionarily, beautiful to us. It is only so because we have been taught to think of these things as beautiful. From what I can tell, the beauty is not intrinsic to the rock, mountain, river, ridge. Those things are just what they are, and we bring the qualitative value to the picture.

Rather, floating through Grand Canyon or the Impassible Canyon on the Middle Fork, or even standing at the base of Sawtooth Mountains in their jagged beauty, what I experience as awe is, I think, rooted in time, specifically the magnitude of time represented in those geological formations. There are granite formations I’ve floated by on the Middle Fork that are 100 million years old. Just seeing them, being close to them, touching them connects one to that incomprehensible span of time. Maybe it is a sense of permanence that we vicariously tap into at such moments that sets forth a feeling of awe.

There is another sometimes elusive but surely magic elixir in these places, and that is stillness. In day-to-day life, stillness just does not exist on any noticeable level. But go to one of the wild and precious places and the stillness envelopes you. There is nothing more calming. It is an odd contradiction to experience because there is all kinds of activity—animals moving about, light breezes, the slow flow of water, birds gliding above—yet the sensation is that time has stopped, the world just is in that moment: alive, calm, peaceful, indifferent. It is a feeling I hope to remember until my last breath on this fine earth.

Sadly, I think stillness and awe are hard to come by in our regular lives. But they should not be. It’s not lost on me that I have been privileged in time, circumstance, and place to have had more than my fair opportunity to drink from these beguiling waters. And I am grateful.

What I know with all the certainty of time is that if more people were able to drink from these waters, we might one day, as Adlai Stevenson once said, “feel the hem of Heaven.” And from there, much is possible.