One special ingredient for a good life in harder times

Today we’re talking about finding our awe in hard times.

But first, let’s talk about the moment we’re living through together.

We hear again and again from people who feel that we are living through hard times, and that the times will get harder.

In Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder, author Dacher Keltner argues that us humans have a deep need to feel like we are part of something bigger than ourselves.

That feeling is the defining quality of awe. 

We’re awe-seeking creatures, and Keltner argues that we find awe in many places.

We experience awe in nature.

We experience it in the collective movement of people in a concert.

We experience it in the moral beauty of hearing a story about a person’s kind or courageous acts.  

But, what happens when some of the most important things that we are part of start to feel like they are getting worse?

Feeling like the world around you is getting worse is profoundly unsettling, and it can make it easy to freeze up or numb out. 

Finding awe is an antidote. It’s not about sticking your head in the sand, it’s about tuning into one of the special ingredients for keeping our vitality in hard times so we can act to make them better. 

Keltner offers a map of the different sources of awe that people around the world seek out in their life. He calls them the Eight Wonders of Life: 

1. Moral beauty (other’s kindness and courage) 
2. Nature 
3. Collective movement (rituals, sports, dance) 
4. Music
5. Visual design and art
6. Spirituality and religion 
7. Big ideas 
8. Life (especially birth) and death  

At My Climate Plan, part of our job is to serve you stories that connect us all to awe. For example,

• The moral beauty of courageous wildfire fighters,
• The astounding ability of forests to heal themselves and our climate, 
• The spectacular reality that millions of people are working to make our world renewable powered right now,
• The feeling of a community banding together to recover from disaster,
• The sight of little garden buds peaking from the soil,

There is awe all around us in these times and tapping into it can fill our well and give us the motivation to act. 

What experiences make you feel awe? What inspires you? Email me at jamie@myclimateplan.com to let me know!

We’d love to hear from you, and share it back with the rest of the My Climate Plan community in next week’s edition.