| We are in the season of gratitude, and thank goodness for that. |
| I don’t remember exactly how I got the idea. It could have been from Sarah ban Breathnach, Oprah, Jesus, or the new Conservative leader, but twenty years ago, all I knew is that I needed to do something, anything. My life was in a frightening 360 degrees and I was plummeting like a grouse full of birdshot. Sometimes we get stuck in the woods and can’t get out. Really, to use theological terms, it was just too frigging scary. So I started a gratitude journal with a nightly discipline of penning a minimum of five things for which I was grateful. For a very long time it was like stirring concrete with my eyelashes, a struggle to even to come up with anything more than “The sun shone today.” Or that I found the lid to a Tupperware container on the first try. Or a pair of clean socks. But bit by bit, day by day, I started to notice what previously would never have registered on my attention scale, either running around like a hamster on steroids fuelled by a diet of white sugar, or so desiccated, I lacked the impetus to look up, down, or even around. |
| The Goldilocks Option |
| In hindsight, it was probably the single most important thing I did to get me through some difficult years and trials. Literally. |
| Yes, gratitude can evoke thoughts of Etsy hand-painted signs and warm-and-fuzzy Intragram posts, especially during this Thanksgiving season. But this Thanksgiving, I’ve desided to switch disciplines to focus my time and attention on “awe” instead. Awe requires the same amount of focused attention as gratitude, but ‘awe’ is more all-encompassing; it encourages wonder, curiouisity, enthrallment, maybe even stupefaction. |
| Nowadays most of us move in the world pretty much immersed in our own weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives, with our responsibilities, our committments. Sometimes it can be hard to keep a sense of perspective in the big scheme of things. |
| No mountain required. |
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| You don’t need to visit the Grand Canyon, fly over the Great Barrier Reef in a small plane, walk through a Redwood Forest, stand in front of Michelangelo’s ”David”, or savour the fudgiest double chocolate brownie with melted chocolate lava chunks throughout to experience awe. You see where I’m going here. |
| “We must look for a long time before we can see.” – Thoreau |
| Here’s the thing about awe. Awe reminds us to be an unapologetic voyeur, to step outside ourselves and that we are not the centre of the universe, much to our obvious disappointment. |
| Dallying — now that’s the key. |
| When was the last time you looked at anything solely, concentratedly, and for it’s own sake? We consume a lot of images but tend to savour very few. We need to remind ourselves to linger. |
| It’s not just a matter of paying attention, but of taking attention, of deliberately shifting our attention. It is ultimately about the sacred and has no monetary value. We can’t put a dollar amount on a brilliant red leaf lying on the ground as the wind softly brushes our face. Or crunching though a huge pile of leaves fading away like so many summer afternoons. Or listening to a beautiful piece of music. Or seeing your philodendron growing a new leaf. It’s a function of selection. |
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| To “follow this way or that, as the freak takes you.” – R. L. Stevenson |
| According to a ton of eminent researchers and scientists, a regular dose of awe is a sure fire way to boost compassion, gratitude, generosity, charity, humility, as well as reducing chocolate urges. Although I have no idea why that would be a benefit. |
| Awe is basically the wonderment that we feel when we see or here or experience something that we can’t easily explain – and have more bandwidth to notice. |
| It is one way to quiet that ego, shifting our attention away from ourselves and our self-interest. It makes us feel more connected to the outside world and feel small in a good way, giving us a sense of something much larger than ourselves without diminishing our own existence. |
| I’m in awe when I watch the construction workers across the street from me BUILD A WHOLE BUILDING, even though the constant pounding is driving me nuts. |
| I’m in awe every time I turn on my shower and water comes out – and that I can control the water temperature. 1.1 billion people have inadequate access to clean water and will never have this experience. I am more astounded than grateful: awe. |
| I’m in awe watching bees in my garden…then finding their way home…and that worker bees cannot have sex. |
| I’m in elegiac awe of the leaves turning from verdant to mustard, falling down and then doing it all over again next year. And the year after that. |
| Taking these moments to awe-spot adds much more value to our day-to-day lives and connections, releasing the pressure from podcasts and periphery and the counterfeit crowns that come in the lacuna of reposts, retweets and ‘likes’; this perverse hunching down over our devices, heads bent, looking like a congregation of mourners. |
| I think a little more joy and a little more connectedness with the world around us is something all of us could use these days. Now this is something worthy of our time – and attention. |
| I don’t know when in Exodus, Moses says “We’re out of here.” But I’m just so hoping it was on a Thursday. |
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