What is Awe?
Is it sitting on the ledge of a high mountain: looking down at treetops thousands of feet below, while a gusty wind thumps your chest and a condor carves a bank turn up a thermal draft towards the sun? Is it lying on your back and feeling the weight of perspective when stars of Milky Way are close enough to touch? Is awe that feeling of bewilderment and fascination that comes from witnessing new life or death; the taste of a vanilla milk shake with a dash of rum after being in the saddle all day; A mad talented street performer; or dawn patrol surf with dolphins? Perhaps I will start with what it is not. Nintendo can’t package it and a person won’t find it on Facebook. According psychologist Dacher Keltner who heads the University of California, Berkeley’s Social Interaction Lab. “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast or beyond human scale that transcends our current understanding of things.” It is ...