Awe is what happens when you meet something too large for your existing categories. The psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, who gave the emotion its modern research definition, put it in two parts: a perception of vastness, and a need for accommodation, meaning the mind has to rearrange itself to fit what it is looking at. The vastness can be physical, a mountain range, a night sky, or conceptual, an idea, a piece of music, someone else’s courage.
I remember the first time it happened to me properly. As a teenager I looked up at a truly dark night sky and the stars were so bright and numerous that they filled the whole of it, a world far beyond our own. I felt small and significant at the same time, in the best possible way, and I have been chasing an explanation for that combination ever since.
What the research finds
The research explains more of it than I expected. The signature effect of awe is what the literature calls the small self: attention shifts away from your own concerns toward the larger thing you are part of, and the shift is measurable. In a series of five studies published in 2015, people who experienced awe, including participants who simply stood for one minute in a grove of towering eucalyptus trees, went on to behave more generously and helpfully than controls. Awe, it turns out, is a social emotion triggered mostly by unsocial things.
It also does something odd to time. Experiments by Rudd, Vohs and Aaker found that people induced to feel awe perceived time as more expansive, felt less impatient, and reported greater life satisfaction, all from a brief exposure. The everyday feeling of having no time is partly a feeling of having no scale, and awe restores the scale.
Where to find it
The reliable source is nature at magnitude, but it is not the only one. The research catalogues awe arriving through music, through ideas, and notably through what Keltner calls moral beauty, the witnessed goodness or courage of other people, which turns out to be one of the most common triggers of all. And there is the version Carl Sagan pointed at when he wrote that we are a way for the cosmos to know itself: the awe of understanding your own position in something incomprehensibly old.
It is why we built Bliss & Stars here, under one of the darkest skies in the country, and it is what we watch arrive in guests, usually without warning, somewhere between the boulders and the stars. Sometimes there are tears or deep sights, and occasional swear word. Awe does that, and nobody is embarrassed by it out here.
However, you do not need to come here to experience that feeling. Awe is cheaper than its reputation. It asks only for something larger than you and a moment of actually looking, and at least one of those is overhead every clear night.
