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Seeking: The Awe
Seeking: The Awe
By Jane Tawel
January 27, 2020
We daily are ambushed by both dire and dreary feelings and we constantly let our minds ramble over the causes, symptoms, and cures of things like irritation, stress, exhaustion, anger, and fear. We seek out morsels of pleasure and content ourselves with our views of what bring us a modicum of happiness. We convince ourselves we are growing personally by spending time on “lunches and brunches” and other rather runty examples of those actions that we think connect us with other humans. We have more expendable everything to create exciting experiences for ourselves, but we far too often lack that which most separates the Beauties amongst us from the Beasts — we lack awe.
There is much to be awed by throughout the planet and we can appreciate nature as awe-inspiring from sunrise to sunset and even into the dark hours of a starlit night. I, as hopefully any one reading this, look often -at least once a day, and hopefully many times a day, to the natural world for awe-inspiring moments and experiences. But I have found that there is a vast difference between being “wowed” by nature, i.e. that which has been created by either a creative God or by an evolutionary lucky happenstance, depending on your worldview; and being “wowed” by human creative endeavors or by artistically and often communal…
