We’re just leaving the month that is both fake winter and fake spring. While snowstorms left a lot of people without power, the tulips began popping.
To me, it’s always the toughest time of year in upstate New York, and I tend to flee. This month, a daughter and I drove down to Georgia to visit family with a quick stop in Washington, D.C. Driving home, we encountered a slush pile or two at a rest stop in Rockland County and then more snow as we made our way up the Hudson Valley to Albany. After seeing blossomed magnolia trees in D.C. and eastern redbuds in Georgia, it was a tough return to winter.
But today as I finish writing this, the sun is brilliant, the sky is blue and it’s the first official day of spring. Already awe-inspiring.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how I was eschewing self-help books because, well, they’re ridiculous. I’m gravitating more toward nonfiction urging readers to seek out delight and enchantment, and I seem to be on trend.
I heard Dacher Keltner on the excellent “On Being” podcast talk about his book, “Awe: the New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life,” so I requested a copy.
Keltner defines awe as “being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.” He collected stories fitting that description and grouped them into eight categories.
One of those is “collective effervescence,” a term coined to describe the feeling people get when worshiping or celebrating together, like at a wedding. Others include moral beauty (like virtue), nature, music, religion, visual design, epiphany, and life and death (awe can also happen during sad events).
“Every experience of awe you enjoy today links you to the past, to others’ experiences of the sublime and how they made sense of them within the…
Read the full article here