Awe

around us? Now, twenty years into teaching happiness, I have an answer: FIND AWE.

we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty, the first wonder of life in our taxonomy.

When our default self reigns too strongly, though, and we are too focused on ourselves, anxiety, rumination, depression, and self-criticism can overtake us. An overactive default self can undermine the collaborative efforts and goodwill of our communities. Many of today’s social ills arise out of an overactive default self, augmented by self-obsess

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Those two books archive the big idea of U.S. history: the subjugation of people of color by a succession of social systems, from the genocide of Indigenous people to slavery to mass incarceration.

Americans today enjoy half as many picnics as we did two decades ago. We have one fewer dear friend in our circle of care than thirty years ago. Thirty-five to 40 percent of people report suffering from loneliness.

How does awe transform us? By quieting the nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.

Awe is the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand.

Darwin reasoned that the blush is a manifestation of our moral beauty, signaling that we care about the opinions of others; studies 130 years later would find that others’ blushes trigger forgiveness and reconciliation in observers—a millisecond pattern of behavior joining perpetrator and victim in a transformative dynamic at the heart of restorati

the heart of religion: that it is about mystical awe, an ineffable emotional experience of being in relation to what we consider divine.