Lars Leetaru
On the third night of my camel trek from Jaisalmer, India, people from the desert materialized at our camp: an old man wearing handkerchiefs and a boy holding a plastic oil canister. Greetings made, they sat by our fire.
From his shawls, the man pulled out two flutes and began to play—a fluid, vibrating tune of a low drone. The boy tapped his empty canister, producing booms and gulps like a log. Sparks are flying. The sky is boiling with stars. In the intense silence between songs, you can hear the infinity of the universe. Even with a blanket wrapped around me, I got goose bumps.
What I’m experiencing is amazing—and according to a new book, it’s deeper than you might imagine.
on Wonder: The New Science of Everyday Wonders and How It Can Change Your LifeDacher Keltner, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, argues that “the feeling of being in the presence of something greater than your current understanding of the world” is one of the least understood but most powerful emotions we have. .
Keltner’s analysis of the responses of 2,600 respondents from 26 countries to his question about awe-inspiring experiences found eight sources of emotion (“the eight wonders of life”), from the obvious as nature, music, visual arts, and mystical experiences. to less tangible things like the “moral beauty of others” (goodness, courage, etc.), epiphanies, and life-or-death experiences. Awe silences our narcissistic egos, Keltner argues. It makes us look beyond ourselves to ask big questions about existence and the universe, perhaps to find answers, whether spiritual or scientific.
For most of my travel life, I was a wonder junkie. In search of experiences that elicit a “wow” or an “aah”—universal vocalizations of awe, Keltner discovered—I’ve hiked the Annapurna range in the Himalayas and driven the Pamir Highway into the sunbaked badlands of Tajikistan, a high-altitude desert. on the horizon-shoving scale where fire-blackened sheep skulls in roadside shrines drip-fed my hypoxia-induced nightmares.
In search of wonder, I traveled to the Neptune Islands in South Australia to dive with great white sharks. When I faced my “what ifs”—What if I ran out of oxygen? What if the hoist cable in the cage were to break?—that scientific research trip was incredibly moving. It felt like a great privilege to hang more than 60 feet underwater among the apex predators. I saw their evolutionary genius, even their beauty. After three dives, I recognized individual creatures.
Surprise is awe is closer to home. “Cultural assumptions suggest that awe is this mystical feeling that can only be experienced by meeting God or seeing the Grand Canyon,” Keltner told me. “It turns out to be one of the most common emotions. You can cultivate it and feel it twice a week. You slow down, stop, don’t try to keep goals or mark things. Then you think about those eight wonders in deliberate ways.”
If this sounds like presumptuousness, it probably is. If we experience more awe while traveling, it may be because we are more present. When we quit the merry-go-round at work, we noticed the details. Last year, walking on the Via degli Dei footpath, 80 miles from Bologna to Florence along the ancient Etruscan and shepherd’s paths, I sat for an hour watching the pulse of the wind through a grass which is silver in the sun. One sentence ran through my head: “He who cannot stop to wonder and stands in awe like the dead.” Not a quote from a liberal academic but Albert Einstein. His wonder at physics led to E=MC2.
Another time on the same path, I passed through a forest where the Roman legions once marched: Golden coins of sunlight scattered across the mossy road, the canopy overflowing above like the surface of the sea. It felt deep for reasons I couldn’t explain, except in terms of my insignificance compared to such age and beauty.
The most frequent source of amazement among Keltner’s respondents was other people: “Those two findings, in distinguishing the most awe of moral beauty and the everyday awe, frighten me. The everyday is the great cause of awe, and our challenge is to find it: in the patterns of light in the sky, in the singing of children, in human connections.”
One morning on Via degli Dei, the twinkling, 70-year-old owner of an inn stopped me on my way. “For the strength of the route,” explained Jolanda as she gave me homemade almond-and-orange-zest biscuits called cantucci. When pressed, he admitted that he got up at 5 in the morning to cook it. Nothing, he said with a shrug. I’m almost bored. And this is where things get interesting.
Keltner suggests that awe provides an evolutionary benefit. Emotional tears happen when we recognize what binds us as communities. My goose bumps in the desert are a social mammal’s plea for warmth through touch. “We have done research, and for groups to be effective, they need to work together, and the fact that we are so inspired by the moral beauty of others, even strangers, tells us that these good tendencies spread through networks and become stronger and more numerous. collaborative,” he explained. “That’s a big root of evolutionary thinking today.”
This is an opposition to the individualism of Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene”. And also why Keltner, after 20 years of studying happiness, believes that wonder is “the secret to living a good life of happiness and meaning.” You can roll your eyes at it, if science isn’t on its side. Experiences of awe release oxytocin, the “love hormone” that promotes empathy. They also reduce anxiety by stimulating the vagus nerve between the nervous system and digestive tract.
Keltner says, “Check what’s good for you on the medical checklist, and this mysterious emotion of awe will hit every point: less stress, less physical pain for the elderly, better inflammation and immune profile, better cardiovascular profile. And that’s before a psychological profile of school children become more curious, that you reason better, less polarize political issues, feel a greater sense of community.
Excluded from awe was wealth—none of Keltner’s respondents cited money or possessions as a source of awe. I suspect we know this intuitively. It says that the fastest growing luxury travel sector is the trips that connect us to the land and the local people. Fine dining at an amazing hotel or resort can be borderline transcendent, but I bet the encounters and discoveries are what you’ll remember most afterwards.
on wonder’s conclusion, Keltner writes: “The epiphany of awe is that the experience of it connects our individual selves with the great forces of life. In awe we understand that we are part of many things bigger than ourselves.”
Exact travel. Like awe, travel can be a transformative experience. In fact, I would argue that awe is what drove us away in the first place. Freed from routine and familiarity, we want to open up, to rediscover our wonder at how amazing the world and humanity are. And that, Keltner shows, has the potential to make us better people. Now isn’t that a great excuse to take a vacation?
James Stewart is a UK-based journalist who writes about travel and sailing.