finding awe in the ordinary

There are two ways to make the world more mesmerizing: to seek out new and increasingly intense experiences, or to loosen the filters that make ordinary experience “ordinary”. You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving. Either way, I think what we’re seeking is an escape back into what we used to be,... See more

- “The duration of felt experience is between two and three seconds …. Everything before belongs to memory; everything after is anticipation. It’s a strange, barely fathomable fact that our lives are lived through this small, moving window.”

One dictionary definition is "an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like: [e.g.] in awe of God; in awe of great political figures ."[3] Another dictionary definition is a "mixed emotion of reverence, respect, dread, and wonder inspired by authority, genius,... See more

And here we arrive, at ‘awe fatigue’, the final pathetic consequence of our rabid digital voyeurism. As destinations increase in popularity and algorithms flood with identical copies of content, visitors' genuine experiences become distorted, and the very concept of awe becomes an ever distant dream. Despite multiple studies showing that the... See more

Dr. Keltner wrote that people who find awe all around them, “are more open to new ideas. To what is unknown. To what language can’t describe.”