Get Out Of The Office And Go Find Some Awe

Do you remember the first time you realized that having a real job was breaking your spirit?

Do you remember the first time you realized that having a real job was breaking your spirit?

I remember it well. I was driving to work in my hot new car. I loved making money and I loved my job. But I realized I wanted to drive past my office and go somewhere awesome. I realized I was doing work and I was doing it every day, all day. Nothing was inspiring me.

Then my buddy Steve Small called. “I’ve got to go into the mountains,” he said. “When I need that and don’t do it, I’m not good to be around.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I noticed this after college,” he said. “If I don’t go into the mountains at least once a year, I’m not right.”

Steve gave words to my melancholy. He gave an answer.

“I’m coming,” I said, and we went into the Shenandoah with backpacks for a week. It fixed everything. But it doesn’t last because you have to come home. I haven’t been in the mountains in well over a year—and I’m a mess in little ways I try to ignore. It affects my work.

Get Out Of Your Work

Maybe because I’m primed for it, I stumbled on an article in the Sunday paper—in Parade magazine, of all places: “Feeling Awe May Be The Secret To Health And Happiness.” Yep, right next to a full-page ad for a cushion that relieves sciatica pain, there was that answer again about what’s wrong with us.

Researchers are studying the sense of awe. When I saw the photos accompanying the article, I knew exactly what this was about. “Awe was thought of as the Gucci of the emotion world,” said Arizona State University psychologist Michelle Shiota—“a luxury item.”

Now they say it’s a fundamental need. Steve and I have always known that. People can’t do their work well if they don’t get out of their work to go find some awe. Now it’s a medical fact.

Stillness

When we experience awe, we stop, we become attentive, and we see the world and ourselves in new ways. The article quotes Einstein, who said the sense of awe is “the source of all true art and science.”

I know from hiking the Appalachian Trail what happens when you crest a hill and suddenly see mountain ridges four states away. You stand stock still, your feet anchor you to the center of the earth, and you feel the heavens slide over you, and over all those mountains, all at once. The stillness changes you back into a truly sentient being.

Pain Relief

Researchers at the University of Toronto found that feeling awe when exposed to nature can reduce inflammation that’s linked to depression.

Steve and I were tossing and turning in our tent that first night out of Cade’s Cove in Tennessee, our out-of-shape bodies aching after a daylong hike with heavy packs. We heard a noise and stuck our heads out of the tent. In the pitch dark, they lit up: a pair of glistening lights over there—then over there. A rustle of grass and more tiny lights. They were everywhere in the silence. We were in bear country, but these were the eyes of deer reclining in the meadow around us. Pairs of eyes reflecting pale moonlight blinked at us on and off. We were surrounded by deer, and it was like we were floating.

The awe we felt was like a chemical in our bloodstreams. Our breathing quieted, we watched a while, and I forgot my aches and fell right to sleep.

Awareness

A few years after a trip to Glacier National Park, Steve called and told me it was time again. We went to the Canadian Rockies and hiked to Merlin Lake, near Lake Louise. There was no visible trail, just rocks the size of basketballs for an hour as we rounded the back side of the Wall of Jericho.

I stopped and looked across the valley way down beneath us. Awe took me like a magic carpet and I felt like I was sweeping across the entire vista. It suffused me for a couple of minutes, then I couldn’t remember my name or where I was. “Awe causes a kind of Be Here Now that seems to dissolve the self,” said Paul Piff, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, in the Parade article. “It makes us act more generously and fairly.”

The article goes on to point out that you don’t need to go the Grand Canyon every morning before work to get the benefits of awe. When you need to go into your mountains, take a walk for a bit of awe by noticing everything around you. Gaze at the clouds or stars. Wake up to watch a sunrise. You can find little bits of awe in the everyday that can save your spirit while you plan a trip where you get your Big Awe.

Steve and his wife, Gay, just got back from a bucket-list trip to the Swiss Alps. They both needed awe. I need to go back into the mountains, and I’ve long known why I get that need. But tomorrow all I’ll have time for is a few minutes out on my deck, looking for the first colors of autumn. When my spirit fills up a bit, I’ll go to work and start planning my next trip.

Sometimes career success isn’t found at work. It’s in your mountains.