actthreedotnet

The few steps it took to walk from foyer through dining room to the back deck journeyed through a portal to a new dimension. An expansive view of the Long Island Sound filled my senses. The ocean was interrupted only by small pink granite islands plopped down in various spots, each one hosting an impressive residential house. The sky was so big and the air so salty that when I took one breath the stress of driving for 2 days in a cramped car melted away. That feeling of awe stayed with me for the duration of my week-long stay. At the time I didn’t realize that it was awe making me feel light and bright and open and so aware of being alive – lasting through hikes across marshes, bridges, over rocks, while exploring an island designated as a public wild life sanctuary and in my conversations with strangers who crossed my path everyday.

What was this magical sensation and why did it fill me up like air? For days I mulled over the phenomenon until synchronicity intervened, delivering this blog by Scott Barry Kaufman, a humanist psychologist I’d discovered a couple weeks ago. He called it awe and wrote that it can be conjured up at will in surprisingly easy ways. So I decided to test it and notice the little things on my morning walk as though I was looking at them for the first time, as a child would.

“That’s the whole instruction,“ he wrote, “You go for a walk — anywhere — but instead of walking to get your steps in or to grind through your mental to-do list, you walk to be surprised. You deliberately go looking for things that are bigger than you. The scale of an old tree. The architecture of a cloud. A kid noticing something you stopped noticing decades ago. The point isn’t to find something Instagram-worthy. It’s to let your attention widen past yourself for a few minutes.”

It works! Trees and underbrush I’ve walked past dozens of times in my neighborhood suddenly came alive in ways I hadn’t recognized until I stopped to consider the surprise of them.

A skinny vine winding its way up a tree made me realize that it’s actually a parasite sharing the tree’s nutrients that can ultimately lead to the tree’s demise if it gets full enough and grows long enough.

The little suckers, babies, trying to be branches growing on the side of mature, established trees. Will they survive?

Look at this young sprout striving to grow, and somehow thinking a suitable place will be inside a dead tree stump. How long will it last growing there? Did longevity even matter to this hopeful plant? Doesn’t everything consider survival as a pre-condition to growth or is growth alone the only consideration?

Did you ever notice all the different barks on trees co-existing in close proximity? Oak, Maple, Evergreens – all living together, sharing the soil and sunlight. Made me wonder how we humans can take lessons from nature to co-exist – and thrive- even with our differences.

Fractal geometry at play, the language of nature and propagation. Trees and shrubs and plants of the same species grow millions of leaves shaped the same way. They efficiently distribute resources to every cell with minimal physical space and energy. In fact human circulatory, respiratory and neurological networks are fractals too. Nature is amazing with no written rules!

Evidently the drive to grow and live is strong enough to allow a little seed to propagate between the curb and the street. How big will it get, if allowed to stay?

And the beautiful Mimosa tree, considered a nuisance tree to gardeners but to me its beauty is to be appreciated and the scent is intoxicating. How can a “nuisance” be so wonderful in many ways?

I came home filled with awe, surprised that such mundane things, seen everyday, could be so amazing. So yes, Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman is right. We call all conjure up awe, regularly. Try it! It’s utterly gratifying.

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