Shawn Vestal: Seeking out wonder – and the ‘small self’ – helps us see the world anew

It was Thanksgiving break. Moscow, Idaho. Sometime in the dimly remembered – at least by me – middle of the 1980s.

A couple of friends and I had stayed at the University of Idaho over the holiday. On one of those days, a ceiling of fat, gray clouds covered us in the early dark of a winter afternoon, and it began to snow hard.

As the snow fell and the darkness thickened, we bundled ourselves up and walked toward campus. We passed through the Shattuck Arboretum, where what little daylight remained was swallowed by shadow.

When we emerged and gained a little vantage over the campus, we saw a scene transformed from its everyday reality: velvet darkness painted by a white paisley of swirling snow. Amber cones of light descending from the lamps lining the streets and walkways, thickened with bright, chaotic snowfall.

Underfoot, the ground felt pillowy. No track but ours crossed any snow. We moved among the buildings on campus – the same buildings we walked among regularly without a thought – as though we had entered a different version of the world. The grand old brick buildings took on a sepia-toned, nostalgic cast: Brink and Phinney halls, Memorial Gymnasium, the Mines Building …

Windows black. Still and silent.

We were quiet, uncharacteristically. The snow raced down upon us from a low, black sky; we looked up into it, with the sense of being drawn upward into a void. Snow gathered in little caps upon bushes, in delicate strips along the hand rails and tree limbs, in the nooks of the roof dormers.

Though the snow was – as they say – blanketing everything, the effect of that snowy hour was the opposite: It seemed as if everything had been stripped of its costume of ordinariness, of the known and understood qualities, and revealed in all its secret wonder.

We might have been on the moon, under the authority of a different gravity. We were seeing things we’d seen many times, but also never before, all at once, and we were tiny within it.

We were in awe.

The experience of awe – an overwhelming wonder at the vastness or beauty or even terror of an experience or event – is not as well-studied or understood as other emotional experiences. By contrast, gratitude, the key attitude of this day, has been much-studied. A lot has been written about the positive effects of cultivating gratitude – and particularly about the possibility of creating gratitude in yourself by making yourself recognize what’s good in your life.

The subject of awe and wonder is somewhat adjacent to gratitude, in that both are important counterweights to the dulling influence of daily life.

But it’s different in one key way: Whereas gratitude involves paying closer attention to your life, seeking out awe and wonder involves paying less attention to yourself and what’s good for you, and more about taking note of the vast mysteries around you – in which you’re just not as important as your daily focus on your own self might suggest.

An emerging line of research suggests that this “small self” or sense of “unselfing” can be good for us. It’s a relatively new branch of “emotion research,” but studies suggest that the experience of awe reduces stress and increases “pro-social” behavior such as charity and cooperation, boosting expressions of generosity and reducing those of entitlement.

As with gratitude, the science suggests that being purposeful about seeking out awe provides a lot of benefits. One researcher, Judith Moskowitz of Northwestern University, told the Harvard Business review that “intentional awe experiences, like walks in nature, collective movement, like dance or ceremony, even use of psychedelics improve psychological well-being.”

Scientists distinguish awe from mere surprise or happiness. A white paper on the subject published by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, described one definition of awe as requiring two components: A sense of vastness – physical or conceptual – along with a need for “accommodation,” or a revision of our understanding of the world.

We encounter something beyond what we thought we knew about the world. It can be related to a sense of beauty, a sense of threat, a spiritual experience, or the inspiration offered by someone behaving in a particularly admirable way. In all of these frameworks, the self – me, me, me – shrinks. In one study, participants actually drew pictures of themselves that were smaller in size after an awe experience, compared to the control group.

Taking walks in nature, following a spiritual practice, engaging in artistic expression – all are potential ways to pursue awe, the research suggests. And when we do experience it, we tend to remember it for life, and look back on those moments as touchstones or turning points.

That certainly tracks with the walk my friends and I took on that deserted campus some 40 years ago. And it’s true for other moments of awe that came flooding back vividly to me as I thought about this subject: the moment when I first held my son; the disorienting grief I felt at the death of my father after a long estrangement; the first time I drove up Going to the Sun Road, as each turn in the road unfolded another astonishment; walking in a dank, green forest on a Hawaiian island as a teenager on a lunch break from a job in the pineapple fields (long story!) and feeling as if I had entered Middle Earth …

I can barely remember my own phone number some days, but I can place myself back into each of these moments instantly. I’m thankful to have had them, and hope to have many more – moments when the wonder of existence pushes through the noise of the self and makes the world seem new.