Things Fall Apart

I get mad when things don’t work. I was recently caught in the middle of a Verizon network outage in Chicago. Of course, it was a day when I wanted to make a bunch of calls and texts. I was flying to a meeting that day, and whenever I fly I like to keep Lisa updated: “I’m on board.” “we’re taking off soon.” “I’ve landed.” But there was none of that because of the outage. Then my plane was delayed, and I couldn’t tell the person who was picking me up. My thought was, “Why can’t they make things work right?!!” I was frustrated. 

I’ve thought the same thing recently about some software that was giving me some crazy errors, and was particularly difficult to navigate. It just takes attention to detail, I thought. I’ve built commercial programs myself. Why didn’t they do more testing? How can they be so careless? 

And then I realized I was asking the wrong question. 

The right question should have been something like, “How do they do all this?” How can we talk to a specific person hundreds of miles away from us? How can they get that huge airplane into the sky and fly us so quickly to a far away destination? How can computers calculate things so quickly and accurately? I know the basic answers to these questions — it’s science, and it’s math. But it’s still amazing. 

There are hundreds of amazing things that we take for granted every day. Isn’t it cool that water can be liquid, solid, or vapor? Isn’t it just fantastic that there are thousands, maybe millions, of stars like our sun? 

And there are even more that we can discover if we look for them. 

Think about our bodies. How does my heart keep beating? How do I think new thoughts? How do we recover from illness? How about the stuff of nature? What has God done? All of these things allow me to feel awe.

There is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies awe. His name is Dacher Keltner, and he talks about all the positive things it can do for us. It turns out that awe can slow our heart rate, help our digestion, and even improve our relationships. Awe seems to bring us our of our selves as the center of our focus, and allow us to have a wider vision of everything around us, including other people.

Keltner notes that it doesn’t take a lot to experience more awe. In one study, he just asked people to take an “awe walk” – just walking around looking at big and small things intentionally, and following their curiosity. The things that we notice can be as small as a blade of grass or as big as a sunset. That’s all that we need to do to begin to shift our focus a little. Those who completed awe walks began to notice awe more when they weren’t doing it intentionally. And they began to see the physical benefits. It’s worth a try.

Now for something completely different.

I’m in Guadalajara, Mexico right now, studying Spanish. I’m not going to focus on the city for this blog entry, but I’m going to start a new section with a few tidbits: 

Church of the week: 

Art of the week: 

Dog of the week:

Much more to come from Guadalajara!