aka "Awe and the Magic of Wonder"
by Andrea Lee
Wild & HumanChanterelle. Puffball. Lion’s mane. Morel. Oyster. Our family loves mushrooms. Even more than eating them, we like foraging for them. It’s our easter egg hunt with fungi treasures hiding under the brush just a few feet off the beaten path or just behind a tree nestled in its exposed roots. We find countless varieties along the damp and foggy Northern California coast dotted with gigantic coastal redwoods. It’s been 9 months since our move from the San Francisco Bay Area to Singapore and with it came a very different terrain and climate.
My kids love mushrooms, too. We are blessed to live in a condo complex with substantial landscaping snaking through and around a sizable central swimming pool. The walk to the guard house and main road takes a few minutes, however with my children I’ve noticed it can be much longer. My daughter, squarely in the mommy’s girl camp right now, holds my hand tightly as we slowly walk along the condo path on our way to school. My son on the other hand has already raced ahead. By the time we’ve caught up I find him just around a corner squatting, peering under the bushes - looking for new mushrooms. He knows this is a likely area to find them, especially a few days after a good rain. I’ve never explained the biology of this to him. It's his amazing observation skills. He didn’t need my years of education or big words for it to make sense. We linger awhile - now all of us squatting in the walkway on our hands and knees to look under the bushes. A few people walk briskly past, phone in hand and messenger bag on shoulder, on their way to work. We try to shuffle our bodies to the side to allow them to pass. I doubt we are very successful in clearing the path. I wonder if they even know what we are looking at. We’ve lived here in Singapore for many months now and this is our daily routine, and I cherish it. That little hand in mine and that voice just around the corner calling me: "Mom, there’s a new mushroom here and you gotta see it!"
My kids, and I think all children, are onto this special experience: awe. As adults we often miss opportunities to experience awe due to the demands of a busy world. Awe goes by other names: wonder, enchantment and admiration. Aristotle called it catharsis i.e. to cleanse, purify and/or release in the original Greek. To children wonder is an almost constant state as everything feels fresh and new to young eyes. As adults, we feel its effect when we are connected to nature, when we have “fish out of water” experiences traveling to new places and cultures and when we come into contact with the arts. These places and experiences hint at something more profound and filled with universal truth, less superficial than our day-to-day rhythms. It requires slowing down and maybe even stopping to observe and ponder as we let the sensations of what we behold affect us.
Biologically, awe is experienced at the intersection of fear and delight (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). It's the duality of awesome and awful, the mystery of the unknown coinciding with an awareness of permanence and universal truth. And thanks to the way these wonder-filled experiences play on our brain chemistry - we even become more creative, generous, self-sacrificing and kind as a result (Joye & Bolderdijk, 2015). What an amazing gift just ready for the taking!
In practice, it takes two things to experience wonder - the stimulus and the ability to perceive it. Is the rainstorm an inconvenience, wet slippers and all? Or is it a symphony of wind-rustled leaves and singing birds as the rain clouds roll in and out? This depends entirely on perspective, even though both may be reality. It would be misleading to provide a list of places to “feel awe” in Singapore. You can’t box it up and you can’t plan for it. However, you can attempt to foster and nurture it through a few practices and perspective shifts: (1) the cultivation of presence, and (2) reinserting the "sacred" back into our holidays.
Cultivation of presence. When I slow down, and I am open to my surroundings in a state of observation I am 100% in the moment. This is a form of presence. Within that slowed-down moment, there can be no two thoughts colliding in the crazy rubber factory that is my brain.
Key to cultivating presence is silence. Our systems can only receive so many stimuli at once before the ability to process it all is hindered. We are so wired that silence has become almost extinct in our blaringly loud world. It is all too easy to drown out big questions with small urgent distractions. Silence, whether it is stepping away from our devices for a period of time, seeking solitude in nature or decreasing multitasking helps us to be a more attentive listener to others, as we listen more to ourselves.
One challenge to cultivating presence is our modern tendency to document everything with our phones. This tendency challenges our ability to be present because we often move too quickly past the experience in order to capture the moment by taking a photograph or video. We’ve hardly settled into a serious conversation with ourselves or others before we are suddenly distant and available for the next opportunity to document. As we document events, we become less present in them. Don’t get me wrong - there is a place for mementos that remind us of awesome occurrences and even encourage us to seek them out again. The mushroom photos included with this article are proof of that, however they are secondary to the initial experience and the effect we allow it to leave on us in the long run.
Putting the “Holy” back in Holiday. How do we “holiday”? Especially at this time of year with longer school breaks and return trips home for the holidays, many of us are looking forward to travel and different surroundings. Is it an opportunity to do more or less, to speed up or slow down? The origin of the word holiday is literally “holy day” and in years past these were special days, set apart from the regular rigamarole of life to commune with the permanent and check in with ourselves. While it is necessary that we go about collecting data quickly and efficiently in our everyday lives, we also need to set apart times for inefficient contemplation of that data. Unstructured times during holidays create space for exploration and that often brings a higher propensity for awe into our daily lives as well!
In a similar vein, the length of our holiday travels has an impact on our health and wellbeing. A 2011 study concluded that participants experienced the most positive impact on mental and physical health on day 8 of their travels (de Bloom et al., 2011). As I write this, I’m reflecting on how many of my holidays actually get me there. In all honesty, I find it tempting to have holidays that look and sound good to outsiders - on my Instagram, in conversations with friends and colleagues - but perhaps are not the most rejuvenating to me personally. To quote Ariana Huffington in her book Thrive: “If we are preoccupied with always improving our lives, we may forget to live them all together” (Huffington, 2014). Let’s put contemplation and “sacred space” back into the holiday rotation.
Awe. Presence. Holidays. Mushrooms. I hope that as we enter a time of gathering, celebrations and connections that you find wonder there. In the small things and the big things, it's hiding just out of plain sight if only we stop and listen, just like my children hunting for mushrooms after a big rain. Speaking of mushrooms, morels are our favorite.
Happy hunting for your next moments of awe and wonder!
References
1. Keltner, D. J., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297
2. Joye, Y., & Bolderdijk, J. W. (2015). An exploratory study into the effects of extraordinary nature on emotions, mood, and prosociality. Frontiers in Psychology, 5(OCT). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01577
3. de Bloom, J., Geurts, S. A. E., Sonnentag, S., Taris, T., de Weerth, C., & Kompier, M. A. J. (2011). How does a vacation from work affect employee health and well-being? Psychology & Health, 26(12), 1606–1622. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2010.546860
4. Huffington, Ariana (2014). Thrive : the third metric to redefining success and creating a life of well-being, wisdom, and wonder (A. Stassinopoulos, Narr.). [Audiobook] Random House Audio.
 | Andrea Lee’s column “Wild and Human” explores nature and how we relate to it, as well as the beauty in being both primitive (wild) and civilized (human) in our modern world. Her column is inspired by her California roots and her family’s recent move from the San Francisco Bay Area to Singapore. |
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