Awe

Have you ever considered that you can play an important role in your community and world by experiencing and expressing awe? Or that you can participate in shaping community meaningfully through intentional efforts to curate awe?

I found myself thinking about both of these questions after listening to the Unexplainable Podcast’s episode, entitled, Awestruck. This podcast episode is an interview with Dacher Keltner, a scientist who has studied the emotion of awe for decades. He explores the ways that awe is experienced physically in the brain, the ways it is expressed in relationships, and the ways it impacts us socially. I encourage us to listen to the episode.

Think about the last time you experienced awe — a sense of wonder, a sense of mystery, or a sense that you are part of something collective or far bigger than yourself alone. Maybe you saw or heard something beautiful. Maybe you were in nature. Maybe you were participating in a collective mission or purpose. What did that feel like?

We are living in an era that includes social fracturing. We interface regularly with divisiveness, and far worse than mere disagreement, this often takes form in discrimination, stigma, and narratives that “other” individuals and whole communities. We need to dismantle these kinds of narratives and protect people from these kinds of actions. That’s the most important work.

But can awe provide a meeting ground where we remember (and re-member) our sense of shared humanity? Perhaps that is also a place to meet. Here’s an extended quote from Dacher Keltner:

“Humans are hyper-social — hyper-collective, and we needed to evolve mechanisms that shut down self-interest, that made the self small so we can thin about other people, collaborate with others, and coordinate our actions with others, right? Well, awe is a very powerful solution to what evolutionary types call the ‘cooperation problem,’ or the problem of self-interest. For a lot of human social life to thrive, we needed to not follow our self-interest, not take someone else’s mate or food, but share and collaborate.

“And awe does that. It just immediately deactivates the regions of the brain that are involved in self representation — the self itself — and it makes you open to other people, [be] altruistic, and [be] collaborative. And I think that the evolutionary story has come into focus because we evolved this emotion that helps us merge with others to become a collective to face peril. It makes us strong, and mysteries require strength. They require collective knowledge, collective discourse, and collective physicality to protect ourselves. And so we bond together through these experiences to face the mysteries or perils. And that’s what awe does.”

What kind of awe would you like to discover? What kind of awe would you like to curate? What kind of awe would you like to share in your work, your life, and your community?

—Renee Roederer