An Antidote is Awe

January 7, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’m about to fly out to a place that filled me with awe before, both as a teenager and as a parent. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that mix of wonder and apprehension that you only feel when you face something that’s exponentially vaster and less comprehensible than the realities you struggle to manage every day.

As much as I’ve poked fun at friends this year that “Your sky is not falling Chicken Little,” it seems undeniable that we’re in the most unsettled time since the early Seventies when I first took this trip. So once again I’ve been thinking about antidotes like awe (and its sidekicks beauty and timelessness). As the following observations attest, you don’t necessarily need a plane to get there.

Awe Can Come From the Sounds of the Words

As part of his project “to re-wild” our language, one of Robert MacFarlane’s recent “words of the day” on Twitter was “roke,” for the thick morning mist that rises like smoke from the ground and water. This picture of it was taken by John & Rosamund MacFarlane

Robert MacFarlane is a naturalist and the author of a new children’s book called The Lost Words.

The book is his and illustrator Jackie Morris’ response to a controversy that, at first, sounds peculiarly British. In 2007, the kid’s version of the Oxford English Dictionary announced that it was adding words like “broadband” to its new edition while removing a host of other words that it found to be “less in use.” Many of those words—including acorn, blackberry and bluebell—put names to things that are experienced in the natural world. Did their removal from the dictionary signal a deeper loss about what we know and don’t know?

Philosopher A.J. Ayres has argued that without a word for something, you are unable to conceive of it. Your imagination, your ability to conceptualize, and your vocabulary are closely intertwined. As a word like “acorn” departs the lexicon, it becomes harder for you to imagine that nut which falls out of oak trees to the delight of squirrels and other managers of their winter stores. Surely, the dictionary’s culling would contribute to these words’ disuse and eventual oblivion.

In the controversy that followed, MacFarlane, Morris and others wrote an open letter to the dictionary’s editors that stated in part:

“There is a shocking, proven connection between the decline in natural play and the decline in children’s wellbeing.”

The editorial changes marked a alarming shift from the natural playground outside to the screen-centered world inside. To repair some of the broken connections, MacFarlane and Morris decided to collaborate on The Lost Words, each one of which had been removed from the dictionary.

With gorgeous illustrations and poems that are meant to be read by children or to them out loud, The Lost Words is intended to operate like a “spell”—as in leaving you spellbound or in awe of a word and where your imagination takes it.

These are some of MacFarlane’s poetic conjurings around the lost word “otter”:

Otter enters river without falter—what a supple slider out of holt and into water.

This shape-shifter’s a sheer breath-taker, a sure heart-stopper—but you’ll only ever spot a shadow-flutter, bubble-skein and never (almost never) actual otter….

In one interview, MacFarlane said:

We wanted to make a spell-book in two senses—in that children spelt these words but that there was also this great sense of enchantment; that old magic of speaking things aloud.

MacFarlane is often asked whether he is hopeful about the future. “The bigger picture is dismal,” he says, mentioning plastic pollution, climate change and extreme weather events. But he’s also concerned about feeling paralyzed in the face of it.

Small acts of care are crucial—grass-roots charities, individuals, books, words, [all] are doing magic work—so to say there’s no point is an abandonment of everything. Hope is a greater agent for change than despair.

You can follow his hopeful words on Twitter too @RobGMacFarlane

Great Teachers Share Their Awe

The shortest path to continuous learning comes from cultivating the desire to be surprised and amazed. The best teachers have this desire, and their life’s work is sharing their intoxication with others who want to have it too. For them, it’s an essential part of completing who you are.

A teacher can stimulate a compulsive kind of curiosity by recounting how a book, an experiment, a theory or an equation is still exciting to him or continues to affect her. “Thrilling.” “Gorgeous.” “Amazing.” “It can still send shivers down my spine.” Students can always follow scents of engagement like this because they can feel how they bring their teacher to life.

Why math, history, chemistry or English actually matter requires witnesses who have already been convinced and can share their belief. For teachers like this, the goal is not to transfer content into rows of empty boxes but to foster “a quality of mind” that inspires students to pursue their own questions while showing them how to satisfy their thirst for knowledge. It’s releasing the intrinsic sense of wonder in every learner instead diverting it into the extrinsic search for grades or the approval of others.

On the most basic level, infectious curiosity becomes a part of every learner’s agency. You complete yourself by your continuing willingness to be surprised and amazed.

To be awestruck.

Awe Follows Invitations to Get Lost in Something Bigger Than Yourself

I recommend Casper Henderson’s A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Modern Marvels. It’s a rambling, lively and insightful discourse on the wonders that are all around us.

Like MacFarlane (another Brit), Henderson is careful with his words. “I prefer the term ‘wonder’ to ‘awe,’ he writes in a short essay about his new book in The Guardian:

For me, awe, even in its everyday clothes, is redolent of something that almost overwhelms us. Wonder, by contrast, is a state in which we remain in possession of our intellectual faculties as well as feel emotionally elevated. It has much in common with awe, but it also overlaps with curiosity. ‘When experiencing wonder,’ writes the scholar Matthew Bevis, ‘it feels as if we know something without quite being sure of what we know.’

Wonder is a state of deep attention in which we feel good and think clearly, and connect to phenomena beyond ourselves.

For me, whether you’re mindful or just about to lose it, what’s interesting about these phenomena is not just the mental focus they invite but also the unconstrained emotions they unleash.

For example, when considering rainbows, full-moons and meteor showers, Henderson notes how little the scientific explanations for these occurrences interrupt our experience of their majesty. Whatever our minds tell us, we are still delighted, amazed and almost lost to reverie when we see them.

There is also tremendous emotional gravity around our knowledge that world leaders in America, Russia and even North Korea have the power to launch a nuclear attack. Musing about a president’s access to the nuclear codes, Henderson manages to co-mingle our consideration of this awesome destructive power in his hands with its tragic and very human consequences by citing a jaw-dropping proposal that was made early in the Cold War:

[I]nstead of having launch codes in an attaché case carried by a young officer constantly at the President’s side, the codes [could] be surgically implanted in a capsule beneath the officer’s heart. Then if the President decided that the murder of tens of millions of people was necessary, he would himself have to access the codes by using a butcher’s knife to gouge out the young man’s heart.

For me, anyway, the wonders (like this) that Henderson describes are always on the cusp of lapsing into deep and uncontrollable awe. While becoming more mindful of the wonders around you may be exactly what you need to counter your screens’ addictive attractions, what makes his book so fascinating is its many invitations to get lost in contemplations that are so much bigger than yourself.

The Awesome Edge

Some really interesting things can happen when you leave the familiar behind and inhabit—if only in your mind for a limited time—what lies beyond it.

Victor Turner called this a liminal space, where the reality between the familiar and the unfamiliar tend to blur. From looking at rites of passage or transition rituals in many cultures—such as transforming a boy into man—Turner believed that when you are at the tipping point between one state and another, the dividing line between your individuality and a wider sense of shared meaning gets blurred. You are not only a boy, but also a vital part of a tribe. Not one organism, but united with the entire natural world.

It’s very trippy stuff, but Turner also argues that liminal spaces provide access to thoughts and emotions that can’t be accessed in any other way.

I had one of those experiences several years ago, when I left my freshman year in college for bootcamp in the Coast Guard. One of the short stories in my book describes the edge of my known world this way:

The Coast Guard’s training center juts into the Atlantic churn at the tip of New Jersey, and its southwest watch station sits on a ghostly beachhead whose brow meets the whitecaps when the moon is out. The watcher’s charge is to look out for anyone who is trying to infiltrate our clambake (or escape from it) when a gate of sorts opens between the fence that extends to the high water mark and the retreating tide.

During my duties at this station during “the mid-watch” from 2-6 a.m. one February morning, I could see:

the stern markers of passing trawlers, somebody on watch there too. There were buoys in the straits, candles that I’d learn to keep to my right when following a channel. Under the torn up dark there were even planes on their way to Newark or Philly, their taillights dipping beneath the clouds and their pilots looking down to see where the water turned to land.

I was sick, sleep deprived, feeling sorry for myself, 19 and wondering what I had to hold onto. I knew where I was coming from, but not what I wanted to go back to.

You have to go out—sometimes very far out—and experience something like awe before you can come back in to reassemble the pieces. It may be the only way to refresh what’s really important.

Place Settings for Awe

Shortly after this post, I am flying out for a week in Rome.

I’ve experienced place-induced awe more than once when travelling.

Looking out over the rooftops in East Jerusalem, descending the slick rocks behind a waterfall in Venezuela, drowning in the flower clogged prairie of western Colorado in late June. I’ve also experienced it in Rome. Like Jerusalem, it’s a place where one layer of history is piled on top of another while at the same time it is intensely lived in—through daily use—by everyone who’s there now.

Because they are living so hard and so well, no one in Rome is interested in turning the city into a theme park, so the immensity of time and lived experience is almost everywhere.

I can’t believe how much I’m looking forward to the pageant of it, the food, and the vistas that keep opening up and down its seven famous hills. When the jet lag has been slept away, or maybe while I’m still in its hazy focus, I might even feel its special kind of awe again.

Note to readers: in a slightly different form, this content was included in my December 10, 2017 Newsletter, the first of what turned into three posts about awe.

Characters Find a Theme

June 27, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

In 1921, Luigi Pirandello wrote the play “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” A half-dozen actors show up in the theater as incomplete characters looking for someone to finish their stories. In this absurdist masterpiece, the completion they find is disavowal, suicide, an accidental drowning, a great deal of confusion, and the playwright’s wondering why he ever agreed to get involved in the first place. Who would have thought that unfinished characters showing up today could find a more meaningful sense of completion in the most mundane of life’s details, but the characters in a pair of one act plays called “Sweating” and “Sleeping” (staged as part of Philadelphia’s on-going Solofest) did just that.

Steve Gravelle has hyperhidrosis, a condition characterized by excessive perspiration. We learn that one in 20 individuals is a chronic sweater, but Gravelle didn’t find anyone else who would admit to the condition until well into adulthood, so he mostly bore the stigmata of near-constant wetness alone. That kind of humidity can do something to you.

Standing in a basement under a cluster of blazing stage lights, he told us just what it was like in a series of funny, sad, profane, and revelatory vignettes, each concluding with his changing his shirt. As our own moisture gradually merged with his, it became like a crowded sauna down there, brilliantly setting the stage for Gravelle’s description of his time in a sweat lodge with a group of Quakers who had taken the ancient Indian ritual for their own. Gasping from breathing in and being nearly consumed by the intense heat, the experience ultimately produces a calm euphoria—a visceral arc that each of us got to travel with this very physical actor.

The sweat lodge story may have been the first time that sweating was good for Gravelle, but in a further advance towards acceptance, his marriage ceremony became another. In Philadelphia, the end of July better come with air-conditioning if you’re going to host a wedding reception here. But in a laugh from the gods that was aimed directly at him, electrical transformers exploded, turning the reception hall into its own kind of sweat lodge.

Instead of resignation to the absurdity, Gravelle had wrestled with his flowing pores for so long that (in this most sacred of life-moments) he ended up accepting his fate in an abandon of joyous dancing. My only regret was that he didn’t do more to show us his abandon in a rhythmic whirl of cast-off droplets, like a congregation’s blessing during Asperges.

Sara Nye is Gravelle’s wife, and the angle she claimed to illustrate her life was the tendency to fall asleep at the most inopportune, embarrassing and occasionally appropriate times. These one act plays were staged in a South Philadelphia brownstone, and for “Sleeping” the audience repaired from cellar to upstairs bedroom with chairs arrayed in similarly claustrophobic manner, this time around an ample bed. Nye is a dancer and collaborator in the creation of spoken soundscapes that envelope a dancer’s movements. The recording of her soft-spoken narration here was underscored by lilting, almost hypnotic music, dotted (at least in the beginning) with strange exclamations and cries, presumably from somewhere in her unconscious.

Nye used the bed the way painter Francis Bacon locates his figures—as a stage for tremendous physicality. She gyrated, tented herself beneath the sheets, draped her torso over a corner, cosseted herself like a queen in the comforter, thrust her legs into the air, and caressed the sleeping pillow of her husband: all to illustrate how whatever she’s doing can be so easily overtaken by the oblivion of sleep.

While Nye’s precision was always supported by her gorgeously mesmerizing soundtrack, her reach was particularly assured when she read passages from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, only to have his beautiful cadences repeatedly broken off in mid-sentence by the doze that everyone who has taken freshman English knows only too well. In a nearly sublime conclusion that echoed the recent wedding epiphany below, the last time that Nye falls asleep, Gravelle tiptoes in to (quietly & tenderly) escort everyone but his sleeping wife out of the darkening room.

We’d all like a theme to make better sense of our lives. What did these unexpected viewpoints tell us about living, or tell the performers about themselves?

Sweating and sleeping in these ways set the players apart from the social norm, left them no choice but to see themselves as singular and slightly askew, and the places where they are supposed to belong differently. In tribal cultures, it is a common rite of passage to go out into the wilderness alone for a time, to think about your new role (as adult or wife, a recent hire or holy man) and what it will be like for you when you return. Each of these plays was a similar act of meditation. A deeply personal way to go out, so you can come back in and have it all make a little more sense.

The Ecology of Work

July 14, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

There’s an ecology around work that’s like planting a garden.

A garden thrives when your growing things are suited to the sun and rain that’s available, and when there’s already a rich enough soil in place to build upon. A healthy garden welcomes the insects that share its patch of ground (the bees for pollination, the spiders and wasps for security), and can withstand the rest with a little help. A garden shouldn’t need too much protection or encouragement. It thrives when it fits or belongs where it’s located.

A garden also serves its gardener. You willingly bring your energy to it because it provides the harvest you’re after: pride as it becomes established, joy when it blooms, and satisfaction when it fills your table. Maybe it’s also the hummingbirds and fireflies that celebrate its success with you by visiting regularly. Or the buzzing sounds of life that surround it when it talks back to you everyday. There’s a particular exchange that each gardener is after.

Work worth doing is like a garden. It fits your abilities and engages your particular interests. It brings you together with natural allies, and weathers the challenges that come with its territory. Work worth doing can be hard, but doesn’t ask for more than you can reasonably provide. This kind of work teaches you something practical everyday, and makes you more capable tomorrow. Your rhythms and its rhythms are compatible.

Work worth doing also brings you a sense of accomplishment when the workday is over; you may be tired, but you’re proud of how your energy was spent. Work worth doing provides you with “a living” (it covers your needs) but it also “brings you to life” (it furthers your aspirations). Maybe your work meets needs that are unmet in the marketplace, providing genuine value. Or it heals what you feel is broken or changes things as you see them for the better. You take its daily harvest home with you at day’s end, and recall the best of it the next morning—so it enriches the rest of your life.

When it fits into its place, summer is the time when a garden’s yield becomes apparent. Otherwise, summer is the gardener’s season of punishment and likely surrender.

Similar messages are delivered (though not always received) during this season of work. The slowing tempo through August offers chances to consider our fit with our work and the sufficiency of its rewards—a window of opportunity before September’s stepped-up pace.

Summer may be the most natural time for thinking about the ecology of our work.

What Good is My English Degree?

November 25, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

What kind of job are you going to get with an English degree (or a degree in History, Classics, Religion, Music, Art History, Anthropology, Philosophy or French)? You’re wondering. Maybe your parents are too.

Or then again: you studied the humanities and now you’re 10 or 15 or 25 years out of school. But every workday, you feel like you need a crash course in technology, social media, marketing, engineering and accounting? Why does what you studied seem to have so little value? Why do all these other things seem so important?

What you learned by studying the humanities does have value—tremendous value. But there are many reasons you might not think so, and a brief look at some of them might be helpful before discussing how the humanities can bring the greatest value to your job today.

The Industrial Revolution kicked off an explosion of technological advancement that has only accelerated in our lifetimes. (It’s x amount of memory on that chip today, twice as much tomorrow, and so on.) At the same time, advances in science created an experiment-based way of explaining the world that clashed with—and has now largely overtaken—a faith- or story-based worldview, at least in so-called “advanced societies.” (It’s less church attendance and more individualized spirituality, when faith remains a part of our lives at all.)

In their upward trajectory, technology and science were also vastly improving our standard of living. At the same time that questions of meaning and purpose became more personalized, many of us were also feeling that we no longer needed the humanities to improve the quality of our lives. Technology and science were attending to our material comfort along with our wellbeing.

Or so we thought.

Several writers have lamented the sidelining of the humanities. For example, Anthony Kronman has argued that as the arts have lost their prominence in our schools, we have almost lost the ability to develop an important dimension in our lives.

Where education used to mean exposure to a canon of Western thought to help students determine “how I should live my life,” that canon has increasingly come under attack. Some viewed it as propaganda from a group of white, Eurocentric oppressors, while others challenged these texts for presenting “subjective” interpretations of reality instead of the “objective” (and therefore more reliable) view that science and technology provides.

So in the face of this powerful onslaught, where is the value in your English degree?

Its value is to give you something that science and technology never can: a personal story that gives your life as well as your work both meaning and purpose. Despite our human flaws and ultimate mortality, the story you’re writing recounts how you can make a difference for yourself and others in your community by what you chose to do everyday. Through the humanities, you have lifelong access to role models and ideas that help you to live a good and fulfilling life.

It is the insight gained from these stories that business needs the most today.

In his “How to Avoid a Bonfire of the Humanities,” Michael S. Malone notes that since the best products and services aim at meeting real human needs and making our lives better, the best way to bring them to market is with stories that resonate in people’s lives.

Given the dominance of science and technology and its associated impacts today, fewer people know how to find what’s meaningful on their own, and fewer still can deliver it to them. Asked what made his company special, Steve Jobs said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

Think about it. It’s not what the product is that makes you buy it, or how you use it, but why it makes your life better. (Simon Sinek’s much-viewed TED talk is about just this point.) Your humanities degree has economic value precisely because it enables you to understand “the why.”

Where the English major is needed is at the intersection between the company and its customers. Having studied “humanity,” you have the ability to focus your company on meeting basic human needs in ways that neither science nor technology ever can. It is a priceless perspective that is needed in marketing, sales, and customer service, but also at every stage of product development and design. Again: Apple ads, Apple stores, and Apple products satisfy Apple customers as much as they do because of Apple’s English majors.

Malone concludes his “Bonfires” article by noting that in the future the market advantage will go to companies like this:

that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling. And not just creative writing, but every discipline in the humanities, from the classics to rhetoric to philosophy. Twenty-first century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.

The humanities have been undervalued and shunted aside, but what they have given us is more essential in the best jobs than ever. Far from putting you at a disadvantage in the workforce, they give you a powerful advantage. And the places where you should want to be working know it.