Regaining Your Sense of Awe

William B. Irvine

This is a transcript of the Essay by William B. Irvine spoken aloud on the Waking Up app available on Apple App Store. I am adding this to discuss and critique it in my own essay: Is Awe the New Sublime

When you were young, the world was an awe-inspiring place. I was recently reminded of this by a video in which a three-year-old child watched her father fill a castle-shaped bucket with wet sand. She was fascinated that her father would do such a thing. But then the father inverted the bucket on the beach and carefully lifted it up, thereby revealing a perfect sand castle. The child was awestruck that such magic was possible and that her father had power to perform that magic.

Were we to catch up with this child ten years later, we would likely find that she had maybe only a quarter of the capacity for awe that she had possessed that day at the beach. And if we revisited her ten years after that, her capacity for awe might be down to one percent of its sand castle level. She would have grown jaded. She would, according to the dictionary, have been made dull, apathetic, or cynical by experience or by having or seeing too much of something.

And the something that she would have seen too much of was the world around her. Some people seem to take pride in having outgrown their youthful sense of wonder. Doing so, they might tell us, is a sign of maturity. Stoics, however, would take the opposite point of view. They would instead pity a person who had lost his capacity for awe the way they would pity him if he had lost his eyesight or sense of smell.

Here's why. Stoics, as I've explained, try to prevent the experience of negative emotions, such as anger and anxiety, but embrace positive emotions. Feelings of awe, however, are some of the most significant positive emotions we can experience. You've doubtless seen someone becoming awestruck. His eyebrows rise and his eyes widen. His jaw drops and he involuntarily gasps. All looks strange from the outside, but feels absolutely wonderful from the inside.

A few months back, I made a very early morning trip to the grocery store to take advantage of what I call geyser hour, the period in which, because of the pandemic, the store would allow only geysers like myself to shop. I knew from the glow in the sky that sunrise was imminent, but when I turned into the parking lot, I was shocked by what I saw. There on the horizon was a glowing orb that was the right size and in the right place to be the newly risen sun.

But it wasn't nearly bright enough to be the sun. I could stare right at it. Not only that, but it had a bluish cast. It must be the full moon rising, I thought, only to realize that it couldn't be, since full moons rise at sunset, not sunrise. It then dawned on me, no pun intended, that the sunrise I was witnessing had been dimmed and tainted by smoke from the fires in Western America that I had been reading about.

At this point, my eyebrows rose, my jaw dropped, and I gasped. The fact that fires thousands of miles away could have this effect. How incredible. I then glanced at the other geysers in the parking lot. They seemed oblivious to the sunrise. They were instead looking down at the ground before them or maybe at their cell phone screen. And those who did look up seemed not to appreciate what they were seeing.

How sad, I thought. You might, at this point, agree with me that it would be great to regain your childhood sense of awe, but might simultaneously wonder whether it's possible to do so. Rest assured that it is, but regaining it will require some effort on your part. Allow me to explain. Over the course of my life, I have witnessed many partial solar eclipses. Some of them are, to be sure, well worth watching, and I assumed that a total eclipse would be like a partial eclipse, only more so.

Then, a friend who had witnessed totality on multiple occasions convinced me otherwise. More precisely, she convinced me that I really, really had to experience totality. Thus it came to pass that in August of 2017, I drove five hours to Whitehouse, Tennessee, a site chosen because, besides being on the path of totality, it was conveniently close to Nashville, which I had never visited. On eclipse day, I parked my car in the filled-to-overflowing parking lot of a Walmart.

I watched as the moon progressively concealed the sun. When the sun was down to a paper-thin crescent, I thought it was spectacular. But then came the moment of totality. My friend was right. It was a whole quantum level above spectacular. For the next two minutes, I was in an altered state of consciousness. I looked not only at the eclipse, but at the people around me. My question, was this just a dream I was having, or did they see what I saw?

Apparently they did, because like me, they had raised eyebrows and a dropped jaw, and they were gasping as they inhaled, and saying, ooh, or ah, when they subsequently exhaled. At this point, I found myself doubly astonished. Astonished not only by the total eclipse, but astonished by the power this astronomical phenomenon had to transform the hundreds of adults around me into the psychological equivalent of three-year-old kids at the beach.

I came away from this event convinced that even jaded adults have within them a capacity for awe. But it is much diminished, and can be triggered only by events that are truly awe-inspiring. Was there, I wondered, a way for adults to recover their childhood sense of awe? Or rather, recover enough of it that they could be awed by more mundane events? I set off to do some research. The Stoics were big fans of delight, the ability to take pleasure in little things and events.

They knew that a life routinely punctuated by moments of delight would likely be, well, a delightful life to have lived. In theory, the Stoics should also have been fans of awe, inasmuch as awe might be described as delight on steroids, but they don't seem to have much to say about it. Stoic psychology is directed primarily at avoiding the experience of negative emotions, such as anger, regret, envy, and anxiety.

One way they accomplish this is by desensitizing themselves to things that make them physically or emotionally uncomfortable. I've explored this process in other talks. What I was interested in, though, was not desensitizing people to negative emotions, but sensitizing them to one particular positive emotion, namely the sense of awe. Could this be done, and if so, how? One way to gain an understanding of feelings of awe is by taking a closer look at their cousins, feelings of delight.

These latter feelings are triggered by the simple recognition that what you are experiencing didn't have to exist, but it does. Let me describe some of my own sources of delight. I am capable of taking delight in an empty blue sky. On seeing that sky, I remind myself that it didn't have to be blue. It could instead have been some other color. Not only that, but its blueness varies from hour to hour within the course of a day, it varies from day to day, and it varies from season to season.

A blue sky in October is a different thing altogether than a blue sky in July. And a blue sky in October, fringed with the orange leaves of maple trees, is surely one of the most striking sights our universe has to offer. When a blue sky is obscured by clouds, I am capable of taking delight in those clouds. Altocumulus clouds are a special favorite of mine. When they are present, the sky looks like a mosaic floor that has been inverted to become a ceiling.

It is just remarkable that something this beautiful would exist, and yet it does. Likewise, when the leaves fall from the trees in November, they can trigger feelings of delight within me. What could be better than a lawn carpeted with yellow ginkgo leaves, with not a blade of grass to be seen? I'll tell you what could be better. Those cases, which I've observed on a few occasions, in which that yellow carpet is spattered with silver maple leaves, the undersides of which have a bluish tinge.

Gorgeous. There they lie, waiting to be ignored, raked, trod upon, or, who knows, maybe even deeply appreciated. My theory is that the experience of awe requires not only the realization that things didn't have to be the way they are, but an understanding of why things are the way they are, as well as a bit of imagination. The addition of understanding and imagination allows a feeling of delight to resonate within the cathedral of your mind, thereby triggering a sense of awe.

In defense of this theory, let me tell you about another occasion in which I experienced awe. I was investigating a rocky outcropping that had been unearthed near my house, on a site where new houses were being built. In that outcropping, I came across a little rock that looked like a bunch of beads strung together. This might have triggered delight in me, but because I had an understanding of how that rock came to be there, it triggered a feeling of awe.

The rock in question, I realized, was a crinoid fossil, the remains of an animal that had lived at the bottom of a shallow sea 450 million years ago. Conclusion. The spot where my house now stands was at one time at the bottom of a sea. What an amazing thought. Many people wouldn't even have seen the rock I saw for the simple reason that they wouldn't have any reason to visit the outcropping. Those who not only visited it, but spotted the rock I found, might have experienced a degree of delight on doing so.

What a strangely shaped rock. But they probably wouldn't have been awestruck by it. My own feeling of awe was triggered by a combination of understanding how that rock came to be there, and my mental picture of how the area around me would have looked 450 million years ago. This brings us to today's homework assignment. Many of my assignments require only a moment or a few minutes of your time, but this is a longer-term project.

Its goal is to cultivate your sense of awe, and thereby enable you to see the world, or some aspect of it, with fresh eyes, like the ones you had when you were a three-year-old. The first step in this fresh-eyes project, as I shall call it, is to choose an aspect of the world that you are willing to learn more about. One candidate is science. Indeed, the awe-inducing episodes that I've described in this talk are science-related.

The advantage of taking an interest in science is that, because it is all around us all the time, it is capable of generating more awestruck moments than any other project will. Those wishing to pursue this path might take a look at my book, You, a Natural History. Although this book doesn't once mention Stoicism, it can be read as one Stoic's expression of gratitude to the universe he inhabits. Rest assured, though, that gaining an understanding of science is only one of many paths towards an awesome existence.

Let me describe some of the alternatives. In other talks, I mention that I row, both as a recreational activity and as part of my Stoic training. Because I know from personal experience how hard it is to row, I'm capable of being awed by the sight of a skull being propelled with exceptional skill. The symmetry, the rhythm, the power. My jaw doesn't drop the way it did when I witnessed the total eclipse, but I do find myself admitting an involuntary, wow.

Besides involving recreational activities, a fresh-eyes project can involve hobbies. Because of the woodworking I've done, I'm capable of being awed by a perfectly cut dovetail joint, something I wouldn't even have noticed if I hadn't tried to cut one myself. Along similar lines, learning to play, say, a violin will leave you in awe of performances by Itzhak Perlman. Before taking up the violin, you might have been content to sum things up by saying, the guy is undeniably good.

Now you will struggle for adjectives with which to describe just how breathtakingly good he is. And by this, I mean how literally breath-taking. Learning to throw pottery on a wheel will likely have a profound impact on how you respond to the pottery you subsequently encounter. Look how thin the walls of this bowl are. Can you even imagine the skill it would take to do this? Likewise, learn to do some magic tricks and then go to a magic show.

While the rest of the audience is thinking, how did he do that? You will be awestruck, even though you know full well that what you have been seeing is an illusion. How did he do that? you'll ask yourself. And your mind will be pleasantly abuzz. It will, to be sure, take time and effort to engage in one or more fresh eyes projects. But it is an investment that can yield a substantial reward. Sadly, many people live lives that are devoid of feelings of awe.

Isn't it wonderful that you need not be among them?