This paper made for interesting reading on the uses and value of awe. Very young children are in awe of most things around them and by any measure they are happier than the average adult. A fortunate few are able to retain their sense of awe even into their older years. I can recall the last period of my life when driving through a tree lined road could fill me with a sense of peace and contentment - the fact that the trees existed filled me with awe.
And then just like that, I lost that ability and it left an emptiness in its wake. The ability to watch pouring rain through a window and be in awe of nature's splendor was lost on me even earlier. Fortunately, this may not be irreversible. I had this experience earlier in the year when I was down with covid and could no nothing but lay in bed and stare out of the window. This one happened to overlook a lovely garden with a variety of birds flying around. For several hours that day, I was able to regain some of that feeling of awe of nature and its bounties.
Multiple studies have found evidence that experiencing awe makes people more kind and generous. For example, people who wrote about a time when they experienced awe reported a greater willingness to volunteer their time to help a charity than did people who recalled a happy experience. Another study found that people with more dispositional awe were more generous in laboratory tasks—such as in how they distributed raffle tickets between themselves and an unknown participant—and that people who stood among awe-inspiring eucalyptus trees picked up more pens for an experimenter who had “accidentally” dropped them than did people who stared up at a not-so-inspiring large building
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