Radical amazement in living
“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement—get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible. Never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
Rabbi Abraham Heschel, theologian
Clambering down the rocky cliffs to a small sandy cove on the wild north Cornwall coast on a blustery October day, I was watching the breakers rolling into shore. The sea here can have a deceptively tropical look, turquoise and clear enough that you can see right through it, as the waves rear up and thud onto the beach. Suddenly I saw two glistening seals hanging in the waves right by the shore, nose to nose, looking as if they were having a meeting, just a very few feet from me. I was transfixed with wonder and amazement, catapulted out of myself into this phenomenon. Then the seals were gone just as if it had never happened.
This kind of experience and the wonder and awe that we feel at those moments is, I’m sure, familiar to all of us. People often speak fondly of the peak experience of the birth of a child or other key moments of awe and wonder. Yet we shouldn’t think that such experiences are confined to extraordinary peak moments. I feel that like the great Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel says in the quote above, our daily lives could be much more full of wonder and what he calls radical amazement. And it is this that I want to explore here.
On the same day as meeting the seals, I was struck similarly, though less dramatically, by various little events: coming across tiny purple violets blooming along the coastal path; by the way a strand of ivy had curled over and attached itself to an ancient stone – the sheer is-ness of the weathered granite rock, hundreds of millions of years old, protruding from the sward along the path; the surprise of finding a huge hairy caterpillar chomping on leaves; lichen moulded inextricably into weather beaten rocks. These may seem quite mundane, but to me they evoked a similar sense of wonder.
And it’s not only about being in beautiful natural settings like the rugged Cornish coast; I live in grimy inner London and have the same experience of amazement at an autumn leaf floating in a pavement puddle. Or I can be stopped in my tracks by the rich billowing cumulus clouds above, as they ceaselessly shapeshift, or a gull wheeling among the city skyscrapers, or a morning glory flower on a trellis. Most days I have these moments of wonder and awe.
I sense that this is unfortunately not so common for many people, and perhaps especially not in the city. I have the luxury of time to wander and explore and I am well aware that many people are under ever increasing pressure just to make ends meet; understandably most people don’t have time or free attention for such seemingly non essential activities. I feel that it’s a great shame. As well as this, there are other societal factors that I’d like to explore further here, which contribute to our not feeling simply present on the ground upon which we walk, and which increase our estrangement from the living world.
I remember a conversation with a couple of friends about this subject and they gently suggested that my perspective sounded like a product of my being older and from the baby boomer generation. In contrast, they were Gen Xers with little time for baby boomer 1960s self indulgence. I thought of the stereotype of overly positive Californians who exclaim, “Awesome!” about anything and everything, or the joke of Californains needing six people to change a lightbulb: one to unscrew the bulb, and the others to share in the experience.
Yet later, I thought more about this exchange. Certainly I came of age in the 1960s and this has been my formative era and I am still very much informed by the values of those times. Of course we can poke fun at the naivety, utopianism and drug abuse of that era. Yet also, significantly, it was a very unusual time of openness, new possibilities, creativity and lack of cynicism. So much came out of those times, much of which is still valuable: radical new counterculture, a revolution in social norms, civil rights movement, women’s movements, music, Eastern spirituality, environmental awareness, minority rights, healthy living, experimental forms of living. Certainly, psychedelic drugs helped open the doors of perception, but it was much more than that.
It struck me then that maybe the issue is more that Western society has now lost much of that fresh spirit of the 1960s and perhaps it was my younger friends who could be said to be jaded and world weary in comparison. The 60s in the West emerged in a time of unprecedented prosperity for a whole section of that generation, and this helped enable a letting go of concern for survival issues and allow instead, a freshness in perception and lifestyle. So maybe the 1960s were not an aberration, but rather a valuable and fresh sensibility.
When I talk of wonder and awe, I don’t mean some rarefied romantic aesthetic where you are perusing an ‘object’ for your personal enjoyment, as if in an art gallery. Simple radical amazement dissolves or shatters any sense of separation, and the overarching sense is of the utter mysteriousness and sacredness of existence. There is no object or enjoyer of the object in that moment; there is just presence and unknowability. As philosopher Timothy Morton says of the former kind of approach,
“Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman”
I can’t help but notice that people seem to be increasingly unaware of their surroundings. It’s not anyone’s fault. Modern life makes people ever more driven and busy with no time or head space, with the demands of rent, mortgage, kids, payments and now social media consuming our time and attention, leaving us tired and jaded with little bandwidth for anything else.
When I’m exiting a lift or getting out of the tube, I often notice how people who are waiting to board, often just stand there, effectively blocking my exit, which means that they also can’t board; it takes a moment or two before they move to the side to allow those of us in the lift or train, to exit. I had wondered if maybe this was a lack of old fashioned manners or an attitude of self entitlement, but now I don’t think so. People don’t generally have any attitude in these situations and it’s rather that they are just often unaware of their surroundings and are not fully present.
I can very much appreciate that factors such as the ones I’ve outlined must contribute to people having little capacity for the likes of fresh perception, wonder and awe. And then there’s been the trauma of the covid pandemic and its aftermath on top of all this.
One other highly relevant factor in modern life is the ever more consuming and enveloping virtual world we inhabit. Even while out walking, I notice so many people staring at their smartphone screens, listening with headphones or talking on their phones as they walk. I often have to move out of the way to avoid people bumping into me while absorbed in their online worlds.
The virtual world is well on its way to supplanting the real physical world where we exist and live and breathe, with all its trees, clouds, oceans and myriad fellow living creatures. We are becoming less and less aware of our surroundings, more estranged from Nature and we consequently have less attention for any moments of wonder. For it’s often the amazing more-than-human otherness of nature – be it a spreading tree or quacking duck or a swirling cloud – that is the weird magic which evokes wonder. The online world promises endless interest and satisfaction, and yet it often leaves us jaded and drawn towards further stimulation like a drug. For all its seeming infiniteness and creativity, in the end it is exclusively a product of the human mind and however interactive it may be, everything within is a human artifact. We are heading towards essentially living within our own minds. As anthropologist David Abram remarks on our technological dilemma:
“Wandering around inside a huge extension of our own nervous system is not likely to bring a renewal of creaturely wonder. It may keep us fascinated for a time but also vaguely unsatisfied and so always thirsty for the next invention, the next gadget that might finally satisfy our craving, might assuage our vague sense that something momentous is missing. Except it won’t.
Yet there’s the paradox: for the more we engage these remarkable tools, the less available we are for any actual contact outside the purely human estate. In truth, the more we participate with these astonishing technologies, the more we seal ourselves into an exclusively human cocoon, and the more our animal senses—themselves co-evolved with the winds, the waters, and the many-voiced terrain—are blunted, rendering us ever more blind, ever more deaf, ever more impervious to the more-than-human Earth”
Just to say, I’m not a technophobe and I engage in social media and online activities extensively and appreciate their value; I’m even a regular donor to Wikipedia and The Guardian, to help maintain the independence of these media sources. But I’m grounded elsewhere, spending plenty of time outdoors, valuing an unmediated sensory experience without any smartphone.
At its root, what I’m talking about is not some kind of chasing mini moments of awe, but an underlying orientation of being, a general attitude of wonder. It’s a basic sense of the utter mysteriousness of life: it’s phenomenal to exist, to be alive, and out of this source come particular sparks of amazement. It’s so basic that it is easily overlooked; and is available to all of us, and is not some arcane state of consciousness. If we can just manage not to be completely distracted, then the unfathomable sacred mystery of life is right here.
