Awe is your Friend -Rewilding Post #4
Every now and then, somebody comes up with an idea that is intuitively correct and applicable almost everywhere. Locard’s Exchange Principle is one of those ideas. Locard (1877-1966) was the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Lyon, France’.1 His guiding principle was that every criminal leaves something behind and takes away something, or “Every contact, leaves a trace.”
Locard was talking about physical traces of things left and things taken. Jumping to an entirely different arena, Robert Fuller argues that an individual’s development of a self is dependent on contact. “Selves depend on input from other selves to take form and to do anything. Deprived of inputs from others, selves are stillborn”.2
Both Locard and Fuller suggest that every social, parasocial, and spiritual contact, connection, interaction, and response will leave a trace of gain and loss. Some traces are beneficial, some bruises or scars, and some are suppurating sores.
If the self is created by contact with others, are those traces who you are? Is your self simply an accretion of all those traces? Can traces be denied, lost, forgotten, modified, or otherwise done away with? To answer those questions completely would require a bookshelf.
But the short answer to the last question is “yes” if we are awestruck.
Anger, fear, joy, or any other emotion may change us. Awe will change us. “Fleeting and rare, experiences of awe can change the course of a life in profound and permanent ways.”3
Awe can be defined as “being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.”4 There are almost unlimited sources of awe, but the two most common sources seem to be human behavior and Nature.
Awe always has two dimensions: vastness and accommodation.3 Vastness may be the Grand Canyon or an individual’s extraordinary courage in the face of an all-consuming physical, mental, and spiritual danger. Vastness simply means greater than you have ever imagined or experienced.
Accommodation means your conception of the world needs to shift or expand to make sense of this new experience. What you thought you knew, understood, or expected turns out to be inadequate. If your effort at accommodation fails, there is often a resultant terror. If it succeeds, there is the possibility of enlightenment, and/or a sudden connection to God or Nature.
Psychologically, the experience of vastness and accomodation tends to reduce the centrality and importance of self. Awe reduces self-focus, promotes social connection, and fosters prosocial actions by encouraging a "small self."5 The result is more connectivity, sharing, and support of others resulting in greater generosity, humility, and spirituality, along with an increased positive affect, including life satisfaction, increased exploration, and a decrease in materialism6.
If you and I stand for the first time at the very edge of the Grand Canyon, and you look across to the other side, you may experience a mind-blowing physical vastness demanding accommodation. I may look down and experience a mind-blowing terror-inducing vastness demanding accommodation. We both experience awe. We will travel different routes, but we are likely to experience the same sorts of small-self outcomes. The experience of awe triggers the building of a new self, a healthier self, a less ego-centric self, and a more positive, confident, less wounded self.
Awe, no matter the form, no matter the source, is a healing friend. You cannot have too much.7,8 Nature is a primary source of awe and therein is the primary argument for rewilding. We need all the awe we can get. You, me, us, and them all need awe if we are to work in concert to prevent Armageddon.
Rewild the empty lot. Rewild the city park, the National Park, the public lands, and make sure that we, especially the kids, get the opportunity to experience awe. We, the awestruck, must overcome the awe-starved politicians, scavenger oligarchs, and social predators at every level. Awe is your friend. Mine too.
1) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8544144/
2) https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/somebodies-and-nobodies/201501/new-default-self
3) Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297
4) https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/whats_the_most_common_source_of_awe
5) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32955293/
6) https://ggsc.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/GGSC-JTF_White_Paper-Awe_FINAL.pdf
7) https://www.self.com/story/health-benefits-of-awe
8) https://connect.mayoclinic.org/blog/take-charge-healthy-aging/newsfeed-post/the-power-of-awe/