finding awe in the ordinary

I had a french professor who once said if you just did something like going to the supermarket and experienced it fully without the goggles of habit and catégories you would go crazy with pure sense and joy. I think about it all the time. In a way this is all for him.

Researchers speculated that the experience of awe might increase participants’ sense of time-availability, which might in turn lead people to act more generously with their time, and enhance overall well-being.

- “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.”

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

Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world,”

Experiencing awe comes from what Dr. Keltner has called a “perceived vastness,” as well as something that challenges us to rethink our previously held ideas