Skip to main content

Feeling Awe

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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more