AWE

Experiences of awe can inspire us to humility and kindness.

I have always been attracted to vast, open, and uninhabited spaces. In 1993, I hiked alone in the Chugach Mountains of Alaska. As the trail ascended the slope, the trees around me quickly grew shorter until they were like shrubs no more than knee-high, and then gone as I climbed above the tree line. It was summer and warm, yet the northerly latitude of Alaska found me walking in snow and through icy brooks.

At one point, high up, I stood at the edge of a precipice. Here I was, isolated and totally alone. The sky was cloudless and clear blue. Rippling ahead of me were mountain after mountain, so numerous that they were nameless, perhaps extending more than 50 miles. There was silence. What struck me was the absence of a single artifact made by human hands: not a lamp, not an electric line, nor any dwelling. I stood alone in nature, awed by its vastness and purity. It was a transcendent moment.

Feelings of awe are perhaps the most elevating and captivating of emotions we can have, and our lives would be terribly diminished if we lacked the capacity to experience them. Awe is also a humbling emotion, and I conclude that in our preoccupied hurryings, our self-aggrandizing ego-flaunting, and our yen for power, we would be better off if feelings of awe were more commonly accessible to us.

Art can inspire awe. So can reflections on wondrous human achievements. But it is in our contemplation of nature that awe is most readily found. We are human beings and we occupy a human world. As such our experiences are in greatest measure circumscribed by our needs and wants, our aspirations and frustrations, and efforts and exertions to overcome our frustrations. We achieve the stasis of gratification only to be confronted with new problems and frustrations to be engaged and resolved. Our lives are lived within the polarities of pleasure and pain and the practical efforts to enhance the former and diminish the latter. We are problem-solving beings and a vast proportion of our lives are invested in the practical striving to cope with our problems. Circumscribed by our needs and wants, our human world is narrowed by them. We are often consumed with small things and our lives defined by them.

But reality is far wider than the range of human interests, far vaster. In short, nature is indifferent to us and our concerns. It does not care about us. Its “interests” are not our interests. Moreover, nature extends out to infinity and therefore partakes of unknowns. Beyond the small swatch of reality bounded by our knowledge, lies an endless ocean of mystery. It is in contemplation of this reality, the indifference to our concerns, of mystery, of vastness, and of nature untouched by human interests, that awe is experienced. The paradox of the awe-inspiring moment is that we are enlarged in our very diminishment.

I have long believed that the study of astronomy should be required in grade schools. If well taught, it would help inspire young minds and imaginations with a truer perspective of the place of humanity and our significance in the wider scheme of things. It would serve as a corrective to the vanity of human aggrandizement, the pathos of selfishness and cruelty. It would imbue young minds with an understanding that most everything we covet and endow with great importance, when viewed from the widest standpoint, is petty and transitory. The cosmic view would not obliterate our wants and strivings, nor abolish our problems and frustrations. But it would shine a perspective on our worldly affairs and enable us to attain a salutary sense of emotional detachment from them.

In the annals of astronomy, there is a well-known event that is relevant to this perspective. In 1977 the Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched. Its mission was to terminate once it reached Saturn, but it kept on going. Today it is beyond the influence of the sun and so truly in interstellar space. It is more than 14 billion miles away and, amazingly, it is still sending messages back to earth. In 1990, when Voyager passed the orbit of Neptune and was 3.7 billion miles from earth, the famed astronomer and adviser to the space program, Carl Sagan, persuaded NASA to turn the spacecraft around to take a photo of our entire solar system, our planetary family, the earth included. At that distance, it was known that a photograph of the earth could yield no scientific knowledge. But that was not Sagan's purpose. He wanted humanity to have a visual image of the true size of our planet amid the vastness of space. The photograph provides a sense of perspective that no other visual image of our world can. The earth appears as a pinprick of light, barely visible against the infinite dark.

Inspired by that photo, Sagan went on to write a book entitled “The Pale Blue Dot.” His citation is worth reading:


“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

The image of the earth from distant space provides a critical environmental message. Our earth is tiny and also fragile, a mere wisp surrounded by infinite darkness. It is all we have. We need to maintain it with care.

But it is also a message of humanism. Our cruelty is a function of wrong thinking, of vanity, of misplaced self-importance, totally reckless of a sense of proportion. As Sagan notes, it is a “demonstration of the folly of human conceits.”

I am drawn to these thoughts at this moment because they stand in salutary contrast to the horrors of war unfolding in Ukraine. This war dramatically stands as a prime and painful example of the folly of human conceit. The turning of buildings to rubble, the wanton destruction of human lives, the mockery made of human creations, all in the service of power, of ego, the search of the petty gratifications of conquest.

From the infinite standpoint of time and space, these conceits will pass from the scene. If nature could speak, it might ask, “What is the point? What good purpose will it serve?”

The contemplation of larger things, more lasting things that we derive from a love of nature and the cosmic view, can inspire feelings of awe. But our emotions need not rest with contemplation. They can fold back into action. From the more sublime, cosmic perspective, we can be moved to humility. Out of that humility, we can be moved to a sense of compassion for all those who share our small planet and a common destiny. And from there we can work to instill our lives with mutual support, with kindness, and with greater joy and beauty.