Awe

/// via leontoh on Flickr

The other day I came across a video linked in a weekly email I get from a website called SoulPancake. The video, created by Jason Silva, was titled "The Biological Advantage of Being Awestruck." In it, Silva alludes to a study done at Stanford University which found that regular incidences of awe are clinically good for you, increasing compassion and empathy and promoting well being.

I'm a nerd, thought this was super interesting, and had to do more research.

The Stanford study found that awe-inspiring experiences could counteract the pervading contemporary "time famine," which has been linked to stress, sleep deprivation, and difficulty delaying gratification. Awe involves a sense of timelessness, "awe puts the beholder in the moment, which can augment his or her sense of time" (Madeline Kruhly, The Atlantic). The researchers confirmed this effect and reasoned that this new time perception could cause decreases in stress and it's resulting ailments, more patience, increased willingness to help others, and a preference for experiential goods over material ones.

Silva defines awe as "an experience of such perceptual expansion, such perceptual vastness, that you literally have to reconfigure, upgrade your mental schema, just to accommodate, just to take in, the scale of the experience."

Have you ever experienced something like that? I know I have in a variety of instances: hearing thousands of voices sing together at World Conference, standing at the edge of Oribi Gorge, listening to junior high campers pray for each other at Guthrie Grove, or even watching athletes push the limits of the human body at the Olympics. When I really think about it, doesn't each day have the possibility to leave us awestruck? Shouldn't we at least try to be aware of the awesome things happening all around us every second of every day? They're there. Just think about it.

I think being left in awe reminds us of how small yet how miraculous our very existence is, and what a wonderful dose of perspective that is. What do you have to be in awe of today?

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
        /// John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"