Our meaning pipes are clogged
Plunging through fear to awe
Listening to Taylor Swift, standing on a mountain peak, attending a political rally, and studying the mechanics of an expertly-made watch—at first glance, these experiences seem worlds apart. Yet, they share a commonality, a mark that writes its story through some of the most memorable stories of human existence. What is this invisible link, you ask? It's awe—that spine-tingling, breath-catching moment when we brush against the vastness of existence. And, as it turns out, it’s more than just a feeling–it has the potential to become a life compass.
I once almost fell off a mountain. It wasn’t a high peak, just one of many bulging hills of tundra on the Alaskan Peninsula thrust up by the repeated freezes cycling over and over. We had hiked for an hour or two to get there, starting from our small off-the-grid cabin on a middle-of-nowhere lake called Mother Goose which required a float plane to get to–as do most places in Alaska–and was the home base for our research on migratory songbirds.
Atop the mountain were a pair of rocks called Howling Wolf because of the way they came together and rose up, mimicking the raised nose and o-shaped mouth of a wolf calling into the night. Just beyond was a ledge of rock and because it was there, my closest friend at the time, Chris, and I decided to meander on out to the edge to see what it was like. Meander is what I should have done; clumsily trip right near the edge is what I did. In those expanded nanoseconds during which I was sure my life was ending, I looked down to see that the mountain fell away below into a steep ravine. Yes, there would be no coming back from that fall.
Somehow, I caught my balance and gingerly sat myself on the ledge. Chris happily sat next to me, completely ignorant of my almost-demise moments prior. I don’t know if the adrenaline rush of survival was part of it, but sitting there looking out over the valley, the lake below, and the landscape beyond–in which there was nothing man-made as far as I could see–I felt a rush of overwhelming humility. One isn’t usually overwhelmed by humility–it tends to have a softer feel in the body–but that’s how it felt. This place could have cared less if I fell off its mountainside and it was one of the best things that has ever happened to me. It was like drowning in the most stunning waterfall, knowing that I was both completely unimportant and an essential part of something more.
Awe comes on like this, unexpectedly. Sometimes it is the goosebumps which, as it turns out, are your body’s signal to cohere socially. Other times, you might begin to tear up, get the chills, or feel your heart rate slow. Interestingly, psilocybin and other psychedelics generate overlapping physical experiences, suggesting that the prosocial antidepressant possibilities of those drugs can be self-induced if we place ourselves in the right situations. Dacher Keltner has been studying emotions, and specifically awe, for decades. He describes awe as: “the feeling we experience when we encounter vast mysteries--extremely large trees, people whose generosity blows our minds, incredible music, extraordinary experiences. So, when we encounter vast mysteries, it produces this emotion called awe which also has the quality, not only of vast mysteries, but you just don't understand it. Your current knowledge can't make sense of what you're perceiving.” You can experience awe at a music concert, while singing in unison at church, or just while looking for the unexpected and astonishing as you walk around your neighborhood. Awe is an interesting emotion because it doesn’t just bring on intense feelings, it offers us a compass from which to set the meaning for the rest of our life.
Overall, we are living in a time that offers the most comfort and the least violence than any other time in human history. But that doesn’t necessarily make it the best or easiest time to be alive. We face many existential challenges–climate change, nuclear war, AI, authoritarianism. We have only recently emerged from a vicious pandemic that we may have all but forgotten in our day-to-day existence, but we carry on in our increased rage, anxiety, sadness, and even our sense of the meaninglessness of it all.
Our faith in rationality’s transformative potential is beginning to feel misplaced. Margaret Wertheim, founder of the Institute for Figuring, argues that “Newtonian cosmology reconceived space as purely physical, creating "the fundamental trauma at the heart of the modern Western world... Because we reconceived the world as a spatial system, [we] no longer had any way of describing the psychological or spiritual aspects of our being."
Indeed, we are in a time where scientific discoveries and technological innovations are slowing down. This is a cause for concern amongst those who view science and technology as the fundamental drivers of society and the future, but what if the slowdown is making space for what has been lacking for a while now? The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called our time, an Age of Disenchantment, and, as Adam Gopnik writes, is concerned about “the modern conception of the self—what he has called ‘the punctual self’—which he takes to be rooted in Enlightenment thought, and about the primacy it accords to autonomy, reason, and individual rights. By wresting our identities away from a sense of community and common purpose, the new ‘atomist-instrumental’ model was, he thinks, bound to produce our familiar modern alienation. We became estranged from a sense of belonging and meaning. We experienced the attenuation of the citizen-participation politics we need. We wanted to be alone, and now we are.”
We are certainly alone. Our isolation is widespread and worrisome enough to be considered an epidemic. We ache for belonging. And we are starved for meaning. But there are whispers in the air of winds blowing in a new direction. People are chasing after happiness as they once chased after wealth or status. But while over 85% of people are actively seeking happiness, less than half say they have experienced it in over two years. The problem with seeking happiness is similar to the misstep of engaging in an argument with a loved one just to be right. Happiness cannot be won; it is an experiential state that comes through repeated engagement with activities, usually shared, that have meaning to an individual. Nonetheless, the bird dogs are all pointing their noses in the same direction. Things might be, relatively speaking, pretty good in the world, but something is wrong with the way we feel.
Awe, because of its intensity, can redirect people’s lives in a new direction. Its compass-potential lies in its ability to break us out of stuck-ness, to symbolize a rupture with the past, and to offer the beginning of a new narrative–all of which are important aspects of refocusing our lives on meaning. Here’s the rub. Awe–in its most transformative manifestations–is a hard-won emotion. As with all emotions, there are degrees. While you certainly can be amazed by looking at a cell through a microscope or get chills watching Alex Honnold free solo El Cap, these experiences are probably not going to dramatically alter your sense of self or your life course. And that’s just fine. But if you are bleeding out from life’s cuts and if you know you need a transfusion of something–of meaning–in your life, it’s definitely possible…but it’s probably going to hurt getting there.
Dacher Keltner seems a pleasant, affable guy. And when he talks about awe, he emphasizes its accessibility. But his own deep dive into the research on this particular emotion only truly started after the calm winds guiding his life suddenly twisted into a storm which blew him off the map.
When a loved one dies, they leave behind a space in the world–a negativity that just aches from the lack of their tangible existence. Journalist Eben Harrell had this experience when his phone buzzed one day and delivered him with the news that a close friend had passed. The ensuing moments in his life unfolded as follows:
“I wandered outside for some fresh air and, overcome with grief, started weeping uncontrollably. Looking up at the night sky, I imagined what I would look like from the perspective of someone thousands of light-years away: a puny figure grappling clumsily with the mysteries of existence. Far from inflaming my pain, the vision showed me a way through it. I then did something quite peculiar for me, given that I’m not religious: I took a knee. I bowed my head. Through my tears I told the universe that I did not understand its rules but that I would no longer seek to. I submitted. A line from a poem by T.S. Eliot that I had read in college popped into my head: “The rest is not our business.””
Keltner’s experience when his brother, Rolf, died of colon cancer was similar: “in the moment of his passing, there was this sacred quality to that moment. Everybody was there, the light, all of us reflecting on his extraordinary character. And then in the aftermath, the honoring of his life was so profoundly filled with awe of the day and thinking about what he brought to the world.” Keltner has found that this experience of awe after a loved one’s death is quite common. But once the rituals of wakes and funerals and gatherings with friends and family are over, the pain of grief often intensifies. Kelter discovered he was left with questions–why did this fundamental person in my life have to leave at such a relatively young age? What is life really about? Keltner found himself, for the first time in his life, adrift, and reflected on how the most powerful experiences in his life had been experienced with his brother. The need for him was too strong and so he set off to find him by recreating their past experiences together.
He went hiking in Laurel Canyon. He listened to music from bands they had both loved. He sought out streets in Paris where they had laughed together. And as he went to these Rolf-infused places, he began to hear his voice or feel his presence. But it was just barely there–a whisper, a brush. It wasn’t until he traveled to India to do a meditation retreat about a year after his brother’s death that Keltner was truly knocked off his materialistic scientific footing.
He was participating in a walking meditation where you walk a few steps, then touch your forehead to the ground, then walk a few more steps, then rinse and repeat. In the process of this meditation, something deep in him opened. Afterwards, he spent some time with the volunteers at the center who were people whose lives are dedicated to incredible service such as volunteering in nearby orphanages. In those self-transcendent moments, he looked them in the eyes and could feel what is fundamental and good about life. Keltner describes what happened next:
“After that I was sitting in meditation. And, in this period of grief evolving, I felt my brother in the sky. And I just felt he was part of some force of life that is kind. And I was like, well, if I try to explain that through quantum physics or whatever, I don't understand. I'm open to it, I think we should be open to it.” The rest was not his business.
This humility and openness, this quieting of our need to explain everything–this grace–is exactly the feeling I had when I almost plunged into the Alaskan tundra. The smallness of my individual life fell on one side of the scale and the powerfully-interconnected infinite rose on the other. It was right after that near-misstep that I wrote a poem called the waiting in which I wrote these lines:
calls echo from the cottonwoods and
the tundra swallows me amidst a vastness
that is as incomprehensible as it is simple
the waiting finds me, alone
but I do not recognize it and I walk
until my legs cannot name the miles
here, I move in and out of stillness
knowing nothing but my name
There I was–swallowed up, stripped of all past knowledge save for the basic awareness of my own existence–and yet, for the first time, breaking free from 'the waiting.' By the waiting, I mean that unthinking state where we merely exist, mechanically putting one foot in front of the other without purpose or direction. It's the hollow act of showing up for life without truly engaging, a veil of routine obscuring any deeper meaning or intention. Or as T.S. Eliot wrote eloquently in Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
Keltner’s grief was overwhelming. And his only way out would be through awe. Like I said, if you want the transformative power of awe, it’s going to hurt. My own experience on that nameless mountain in Alaska was also preceded by a sense of drift. I had gone off to a prestigious college where many of my relatives had also gone, unthinkingly expecting to love it as they had. But that was not what happened. I didn’t fit in with the frat culture or the extremely outdoorsy culture and there wasn’t much in between. In class, where I dreamed of finding unendingly curious like-minds, I found only pretentiousness and surface-level interest in the deep ideas I wanted to explore. The winters were long and bitter cold. My friend group had dwindled to one hockey player who entered a dark depression, and his heaviness became my only lens. I was deeply disillusioned by the performative intellectualism and by the discovery that the overriding post-graduation goal of the majority of my peers was to move things around markets. Screw that abstraction. I wanted to hold something in my hands and to stand in a place where the world could tell me what the hell the point of all this was.
I took the first step in that process when I recognized my life could end at any moment. I am a fearful person. Perhaps we all are. I was terrified of going to Alaska at all–it just seemed so untamed, so unlike any environment I had ever encountered before–and that was before I got a call from someone at U.S. Fish and Wildlife about a week before I was set to leave notifying me that a fellow volunteer on the project had disappeared while crossing the mud flats that edged the lake. Though they had not yet been able to locate his body, he was presumed to be dead. Well, that did it. It ratcheted my fear from a 5 to a 9 on a 10-point scale. And it provided me with the easy out that some part of me had been looking for. Of course I couldn’t go: someone had just died, his colleagues were now grieving, the place was too dangerous. Certainly, anyone would understand my choice to back out.
And this is where awe comes in. Keltner explains that “awe helps us realize that ‘our idea of, oh, I've got these goals and I'm striving for them as an individual. It's kind of an illusion.’” Such an important epiphany. But even more than that, the kind of awe that transforms us, the kind of awe that is able to be a compass for the rest of our lives is so often preceded by gut-wrenching grief, indescribable fear, or deafening anguish. The father of the infamous Cacophony Society in 1980’s San Francisco–and one of the first attendees to the early Burning Man event–Gary Warne, was fascinated by fear. In facing and overcoming it through sometimes risky and often not-recommended ways, he discovered that: ”Fear is a freeze on the future, the filter or floodgate that stops our imaginings; something within us that stops us from becoming more powerful and loving.” It clogs up the pipes through which meaning should flow. And the other big shit in our pipes is comfort. Awe can be our meaning-plunger.
There is just too much noise out there to ignore. The noise of restlessness. People are looking this way and that for ways out of a world stripped of spirit, of community, of meaning. Listen to the noise: a renewed interest in philosophies like Stoicism and spirituality with the rise of mindfulness apps like Headspace and Calm, a shift towards more purposeful and ethical business practices such as the growth of B corporations like Toms or Patagonia, an emphasis on community and connection in urban planning with the development of “15-minute cities,” the increase in co-living spaces and the like, and a prioritization of education that emphasizes not just knowledge acquisition, but emotional intelligence (SEL programs) and community well-being. Just look at the millions of people who have tried to learn the secrets to happiness from courses like Psychology and The Good Life at Yale.
But I’m guessing this isn’t enough. We will have to recognize, witness, and hold hands with fear in order to plow through to whatever might be deeper…and better. As Krista Tippett explains in her interview with Dacher Keltner: “I realized so much of how I think I’ve learned to get grounded when things are hard is all about settling inside, getting calm, and looking in. But what you are talking about with going in search of awe and making awe a practice is another move. It’s a complimentary move. It’s not just looking in — it’s looking up and out and getting activated in a grounding way.”
We don’t just want to look in and settle. We want more. We ache for more. And we are pretty sure that there is more out there. This hunger for meaning is captured by Steven Kotler at the beginning of, West of Jesus, his surfing-towards-meaning-and-epiphany memoir: “I went to Mexico because I had spent the summer working as hard as I can remember working while realizing that my life has somehow developed a heavy glass ceiling that I was constantly slamming my head against. I was thirty-six years old, a citizen or least a taxpayer, in need of a new couch, fully capable of making green beans in the Szechuan style, single, not especially lonely, plagued by junk mail, attached to the words of Ernest Hemingway: ‘The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are stronger at the broken places.’ I was a little amazed that life was nothing more than an accumulation of days. I was suffering the same disjointed feeling that many my age seem to suffer: life was not going to be anything other than what I made it…I can say that at the time I went to Mexico I was thirty-six years old and the things I was choosing not to do were starting to add up into a whole other life I was choosing not to live.” What would true well-being look like? Is it just stress reduction? Is it just calming yourself as the accumulation of days slip by? Is it letting all the niceties get too comfortable? Or is it a reorientation of your life towards some greater meaning?
So yes, go dance at a wedding. Hike through the woods near your house. Watch a woman fall in love with a squirrel. Take an awe walk. Go to a rave. Definitely watch this video. Go to that Taylor Swift concert and let the music wash over you. Stand on a mountain peak and feel your place in the vastness. Attend a political rally and sense the collective energy of change. Study the intricate mechanics of an expertly made watch and marvel at human ingenuity and exquisite abstract design. Swim out a few paces in the ocean, turn onto your back, and stare up at the vast sky and beyond. But if you want to get to meaning, you are going to have to get beyond yourself...and fear is your guidepost on which road to take to start that journey. There is a reason you are terrified–your life is on the line. Whether that thing you fear is physically dangerous or just requires you to sit in and into the deepest pain, the goal is not to get through it. The goal is not to bear these things. There isn’t actually a goal at all. There is just the moment where you are able to transcend your isolated, lonely, fearful self and find that you have been a part of something bigger all along.
For this week’s curated resources on awe, please visit:
And just to state the obvious, since that is always important, the resources on Constructed Mind are all hyperlinked. In other words, they are tee’d up and ready for you to explore.
And if you missed my note this week, I want to share with you that the coming weeks will be thematically linked by an initiative of Constructed Mind called The Stronger Project.
The Stronger Project is an initiative whose mission is to redefine strength through qualities of openness such as humility, vulnerability, listening, and flexible thinking. The core values of The Stronger Project are as follows:
Our Guiding Principles:
Vulnerability: Full exposure risks full embrace
Humility: You are your blind spot
Mindfulness: The only way to there is here
Uncertainty: The sure path darkens the dawn
Curiosity: Wisdom lies in the questions
Empathy: Everyone is struggling, just like you
Flexibility: Don't trust everything you think
Courage: Step into fear
Awe: Where you end, you begin
Listening: Meaningful communication starts with your ears
Civil Discourse: Tell me more about that
As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments. If there is anything that I am doing that resonates with you, please like or share. The support helps me continue with this project in which I believe so deeply.
From your fellow thought explorer and eternal seeker,
Katie