Awe for the Intellectual
Poking your right brain hemisphere is time well spent..
Children easily enter a state of wonderment and can be amazed by all kinds of random things. This fades as the child becomes a teenager. As one is solidly in the adult / parent box, you pretty much never see this again.
In my previous post, I spoke about adverse emotions being a potential source for “knowing what to do next”. This time, I want to explore a positive emotion which can indirectly propel us into “smooth sailing”, a feeling that is more potent than joy and happiness[1].
What is awe? What is the point of working this muscle in adults/teens?
In a paper by Keltner and Haidt [2], awe is described as “an experience of perceived vastness, inability to assimilate experience into the current mental structure ” , (basically when your jaw drops or your current understanding of the world is challenged). They define 5 additional factors that account for variation in the experience of awe - threat, beauty, exceptional ability, virtue and supernatural.
When awe is lacking, it makes us prone to bouts of excessive cynicism, arrogance, pessimism, helplessness, and righteousness.
When awe is present, it makes us alive and curious. The invoked recognition of the speck of dust that we are, makes us humble.
Our entire observable universe in 1 image. (Image credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi/Wikimedia Commons)
We can experience awe through many avenues. One of them is through stories of resilience like Viktor Frankl's endurance in a concentration camp in "Man's Search for Meaning" or by witnessing the wonders of human progress in books like "The Rational Optimist. How Prosperity Evolves" or "Better Angels of Our Nature. Why violence has declined" .
Usually when one encounters powerlessness and excessive pessimism, it can be concluded that the person has not read enough. No appreciation of past feats. No ability to see the hidden order in things and the interconnectedness of all existence. This gives rise to the meaning crisis so many find themselves in nowadays.
We know that reading and looking at history inspires us to do wonderful things: During the Renaissance we looked back and were in awe of the feats of Greeks and Romans. We used their influence to create great art, architecture and inventions.
The problem is that we are losing the capacity for awe as our society becomes more left - brain dominated:
In his seminal work "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" , psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher Iain McGilchrist explains how over time, the human left and right brain hemispheres have become more divided and asymmetric in their influence over us. He explains how this is affecting not only our personal reality, but also shaping the fabric of our society. Because of this left-right increasing imbalance, the world we have created is run by the left hemisphere’s limited and controlling nature. I can’t do his ideas justice in a blog post, a good summary can be found here.
In his latest 1500 page magnum opus, "The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World" , McGilchrist elaborates on our impaired judgement as a result of being dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, questions the science claims on truth and potential remedies to the predicament. In a recent interview Iain said :
‘Your existence is not necessary, your existence is gratuitous, stop and remember this every day. If you develop a habit of awe and admiration, your reality actually changes.’
The loss and recovery of awe in normal life
The point where most children lose the ability to be in awe coincides with the amount of acquired “knowledge”, thinking one knows it all and has “seen it all”. It is the false feeling that “there are less and less things one can be surprised by.
The older, the more bogged down in our own head and routine we get, the less awe we can experience. Agape is another term used to describe awe as a state of being open, vulnerable, or receptive. Basically, when your life is over optimized, the room for experiencing awe is shrunk.
How much capacity for awe a child retains, depends on:
● The amount of unstructured time to ponder, play and explore
● How much the child reads out of own interest
How often the child sees close adults experiencing it
The majority of parents are habituated to a normal “serious” state for “responsible” people, perhaps because that is what they see around them, with very few exceptions. The “other” people, who regularly experience awe, are found in books, occasionally on TV. A live specimen of an adult living a life filled with awe is an endangered animal (if you step away from the world of Instagram and Twitter).
An interesting question to ask your social circle is “What would you do if you had your ultimate money number?”. It turns out, the quiet dreams of many professional adults are free time to read, tinker with random ideas and sleep freely/naps. (Common alternatives to Read, Sleep, Tinker are some variety of wandering around, dancing, writing, gardening, creation and craft of various kinds, nature exposure in various ways. I will stick with Read/Sleep/Tinker as an encompassing idea of “This”).
These are not necessarily very expensive, but they are not prioritized today and delayed till retirement or ‘more money’. But this is exactly how the state of awe gets the fertilizer that it needs to grow:
Tinkering with ideas that are led by one’s curiosity (with no obvious goal), exploring things.
Giving the mind enough peace and slack to be able to tap into the right brain hemisphere. Naps do this very well. Some of the biggest scientists were huge nappers (Einstein, Tesla, Edison, Da Vinci). Just some of the discoveries made during dreams and half-asleep slumber can be found here .
Time to read many books, which broadens one's horizon, curiosity, inspiration and ability to find and synthesize ideas.
These 3 things could actually make for a perfectly fine life in itself. It would actually beat many lives in quality - giving oneself permission to freely read, sleep and tinker/play.
When a person’s schedule is filled with ‘responsibilities’, ‘performance’ and “mandatory” social / professional engagements, there is little space for inspiration.
The things that one’s soul aches for are not prioritized and classed as frivolous.. Those exact things that allow for that space and slack for the experience of the miracle of life.
You might say “Yes, but this is not how the world works, I have bills to pay, children to educate etc’. The debunking of the contents/ math of these limiting beliefs, after a basic level of substance has been achieved, can be a book on it’s own and others have written them. I will just say 2 things on this for now:
1) Where there is a will there is a way. Plenty of examples to observe (in the same world) where people found that way
2) Attachment to possessions and lifestyle that stopped giving the same amount of joy is often left unquestioned forever.
As you might have noticed this blog is not really about how to parent the children, but on parenting oneself, with the end result being: the children are alright…
A child, that sees the parent tinker and have unstructured time to savour life, will follow suit.
A child, that encounters his parents taking the time being engrossed in his book, will look forward to reading.
A child, that sees a parent amazed by random things the parent encounters, is a child that will develop this muscle naturally and keep the vitality through his adulthood.
A child who sees parents denying themselves the things that make life wonderful, whilst embracing the mechanical over optimised existence - is the child who will become the robotic hamster in the wheel, further moulded by the education system that was designed for the industrial era.
Preaching ‘how to’ does not work. Saddling the child with the task of ‘doing better than me’ , is a weight they do not need.
Leading by example is the only parenting that ‘arrives’.
Regaining Awe as a parent
So, you are a big thinker and a person with responsibilities?
Break a rule, break a convention, surprise yourself!
Me and a friend were walking back home from dinner in Notting Hill. I kind of know the direction, but was winging it without google maps. We come across a kind of locked private park/gardens in Maida Vale that, by the look of it, gives a big shortcut if crossed. The wall/ gate on our side is small and can easily be hopped over. A third girl shows up who has the same idea. She seems local and says that if only we cross this little fence here, then on the other side the gate should be unlocked and we can get out. We chance it, climb the little fence, and cross the park.
On the other side we encounter a 2.5-meter wall and a locked gate. Brick and long spiky poles…
Going with the flow, we decided that getting on top of this wall could be doable and better than walking back and around. We did not give enough thought to how we would come down on the other side. Getting down turned out indeed much harder and included the risk of impaling our heads on the spikes. Cars driving by,people staring when three 40-year old “children” are figuring out how to get down. In the end we did it clumsily, as a team.
End result? Experience of awe about following along a weird developing situation and getting involved in something unusual, a little act of disobedience, providing a moment of childish abandon. Son at home is amazed I illegally climb wall in private park. Seems random and unimportant, but things like that can weave together a life.
This is another type of awe, that's not sunsets, music and natural wonders (all of them are great and easy!). This is awe with what a person can discover about themselves, surprise with their own being…
Thank you for reading.
Anna
Some avenues to explore:
I like Tom Morgan’s blog – he is a finance guy who is actively bridging the gap between the rational left brain world and subjects that awaken the right brain, without the naive fluff you often get in any spiritual writings:
Good breakdown of Iain McGilchrist left/right brain idea and summary of first book:
https://www.sloww.co/left-brain-right-brain-hemispheres/
Interview about Iain McGilchrist second book, The Matter with Things:
https://besharamagazine.org/metaphysics-spirituality/iain-mcgilchrist-the-matter-with-things/
Meaning crisis rabbit hole, a podcast by John Vervaeke https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ
[1] The Nature of Awe. Michelle N. Shiota and Dacher Keltner , University of Berkeley https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/dacherkeltner/docs/shiota.2007.pdf
[2] Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, aesthetic emotion . Jonathan Haidt and Dacher Keltner https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/dacherkeltner/docs/keltner.haidt.awe.2003.pdf