What if Awe Could Save Your Life?
Dear beauties,
Before we get into the physical properties of awe, let’s start on a fun ditty about Brutal Honesty as a form of awe, especially when it’s not taken personally.
THE TOOTH IS YELLOW
I’ve been harumphing to my husband about a vanity issue: one of my capped front teeth is yellowing, and I’m starting to cringe at photos of myself. Is it time to do something about it?
“You look great, I don’t notice it at all,” my husband assured me the other day.🤥
There’s a part of me that wants to believe him, but I have eyes, I can see what’s happening. Enter my five-year-old grandson, he of the truth-telling age.
“Sometimes you don’t brush your teeth,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Oh really?” I answered. “How can you tell?”
“That one is sort of gold,” he pointed.
“See!” I told Steve, “at least Caden will level with me.”
I love the brutal honesty of kids. There’s something great (freeing even!) about the truth delivered matter-of-factly in a way that only our youngest members of society can pull off.
If my mom had addressed my yellowing tooth as such, I would not have possessed such open delight. 😤
🦩 🦩 🦩
On to the physical-spiritual properties of awe.
What if seeing Beauty--and being moved by it--is our real work as humans?
I listened to a Fresh Air interview on the topic of heartbreak, specifically the science behind it, and the health implications that can follow a big loss, stressful event, divorce, or arise due to ongoing loneliness.
As horrible as it is, heartbreak fascinates me. I’ve had a few of my own, and the clawing, debilitating and persistent sadness, a sadness that often felt like it was separating me from the world of humans who were humming away in their tidy little lives (let’s add the demented quality of heartbreak), was such a bizzaro experience. And then there’s the “lasting impact” our culture warms us about, how a heartbreak or a grief/loss experience can leave a person scarred.
But what about resilience? Don’t we have this innate emotional resilience, our own built-in resource to get over things?
Well GET THIS💥
What experts are finding is that people who are able to get through big loss events without lasting negative health and mental impacts are the ones who can experience beauty. And awe.
AWE!
AWE: an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like.
Example: an unexpected late-day sunset that fills the western sky with variations in citrus, above.
If you’re someone who can experience awe easily—say getting goosebumps at a concert, or teary-eyed on a mountain top, then you're going to be more resilient after really stressful events.
In brain studies, experts can see that when people are in the presence of something really beautiful, the brain makes all these connections, and the neurons fire up—because we’re trying to understand what is so beautiful in front of us.
Aside from being carried away by the object or experience of one’s awe (it can be as much an act of kindness as the citrus-spilling sunset), I find that awe and beauty pop me out of my head and more importantly take me off my mind, even if for a second. So when I am loving the world, the world is loving me back by relieving me of my self.
The brain-making-sense of the beauty also cleared up the achey-itchy feeling that a state of awe can create, that shriek of “It’s so beautiful I can hardly stand it!” I have often turned to a friend, while walking into a glassy lake in our swimsuit and goggles, as the sun yoke broke over the Cascades, and moaned, “How do we even handle this beauty?” I can feel my brain working slow-motion, making notations on every glimmer and angle that Beauty is shaking me down with.
In this week’s salon, we Beauty Hunters let this beauty-awe-resilience information sink in, and then we connected it to this section of Mary Oliver's poem "Messenger":
Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
Oliver doesn’t say that her work is *being astonished*...
But LEARNING to be astonished. The real work
What does it mean to learn to be astonished?
How do you open up to awe, feel more beauty moments, the kind where you gaze up up the trunk of a spectacular Western Red Cedar; watch a three-year-old drink hot chocolate, or stand mesmerized before the evening sky, shrieking, “IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL I CAN’T EVEN STAND IT?”
I can offer a few suggestions:
Stop, and stand in front of the tree; watch, really watch a young person take absolute glee in something as pedestrian as drinking hot chocolate and getting it all over her face. Slow down and be present to the world, spend more time with the things that exalt your senses.
Find a person, that person who stops in the middle of a walk to point out the bright purple berries growing on an otherwise naked winter tree, or a friend who says WOW a thousand times even as you try to tell her something very important and serious about your life at the moment and she just WOWS right over it 🙋🏻♀️. Take a walk with friends; together, you’re more likely to point out beauty and experience awe together. Just as we are more resilient and heal in community.
Put up the antenna and make a commitment to notice beauty, whatever that means to you. You have your own way of noticing and metabolizing beauty; your awe is your own unique expression and it’s there, just waiting for you like a meadow, waiting for you to walk in and lay down with the wildflowers, stare up at the periwinkle sky.
The other day I was beside myself over a cup of coffee. That’s all! The creamy swirly surface in the perfect cup shape was something I could have looked at all day, so I took about ten photographs, then shoved them under my husband’s nose so he could enjoy them too. I still exhalt over this cup of coffee. 🧚♀️
To conclude this beauty-ramble—
It’s not so crazy that our purpose is to experience Beauty; to ask the senses to tune into beauty, like an antenna, to stop long enough to experience awe. Beauty hits and states of awe are not only how to live, but the best way to build an emotional resilience that allows us to endure the bumps along the way, and even come through stronger, wiser, and more creative.
With this in mind, why not consider Beauty as the way to heal the world?
PS. And if you don't feel beauty/awe, that's OK too. It's there for you when you're ready.
SOURCE: The beauty-awe-resiliency reference comes from Terry Gross interviewing Florence Williams, author of "Heartbreak" on Fresh Air, Feb 1, 🦩 🦩 🦩