Awe and wonder are essential to the human experience. Wonder fuels our passion for exploration and learning, for curiosity and adventure. […] Some researches even believe that “awe-inducing events may be one of the fastest and most powerful methods of personal change and growth.”
from Atlas of the Heart by Dr. Brené Brown, p. 59
I experienced awe and wonder just yesterday, when I saw the touring production of the Broadway show Hadestown. There were so many moments of the depth of human expression, sent from the stage directly to me in the back of the balcony. Joy, grief, pain – all communicated brilliantly through song, acting, and the technical work of the production.
Live performances – concerts, plays, and the like – are one of my primary ways of experiencing awe. It’s a feeling that is hard to translate through a screen (hard, but not impossible: I remember the wonder of seeing Into the Woods on a TV for the first time), and certainly the best television and movies are produced with a knowledge of how to convey awe and wonder asynchronously, at a distance. But I don’t feel awe and wonder very often through YouTube, and I have yet to watch one livestreamed choral concert or Virtual Choir that gave me a sense of awe or wonder. Dr. Brown describes it as, “like we’re seeing something that doesn’t fit with how we move through and understand our everyday lives.” The reality of things happening in real-time tend to help induce awe and wonder.
That’s part of what made the necessary closures of the pandemic so challenging. To reiterate, “Awe and wonder are essential to the human experience,” and they were so hard to experience during the stay-at-home and no-performance times. Now that performances are mostly back, somewhere close to normal, it’s got to become a priority to seek out the experiences that will reliably induce awe and wonder. (Reliably? There is no reliable…part of the experience of awe and wonder is being surprised by it.)
What gives you awe and wonder? How do you seek it?