We had just attended a wake for a relative. Not someone I knew well, but a person whose death I wanted to honor in the traditional Filipino fashion: by joining the family as they held vigil over her remains at a local funeral parlor. As usual, there were prayers, condolences, and hugs.
Then came the part I hadn’t expected: a stop on the way home to change clothes. “It’s a Filipino custom,” my niece explained. “We consider it bad luck to wear those clothes home, especially if there’s someone sick in the house.”
The “someone sick,” in our case, is my sister-in-law, still lying semi-comatose in her bedroom four months after a tragic motorcycle accident inflicted serious brain damage. But the ritual of changing clothes also made me smile, thinking of the Jewish custom of washing one’s hands after attending a funeral to remove the “stench” of death.
All of which reminded me of the universality of certain human experiences, including my favorite; the sensation we refer to as awe.
“Awe is an emotion we feel in the spine tingling, the lump in the throat, the warmth in the chest—when we encounter vast mysteries we don’t understand,” explains Dacher Keltner, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who’s spent his life studying it. “Wonder follows those big experiences of awe. It’s an epistemological state that animates exploration, curiosity, and discovery…Awe is the fabric of culture.”
Keltner has identified several sources of awe he believes are found in every nation and culture. First, he says, people feel it through spiritual experiences “in the divine, in yoga, in sacred texts, or out in nature.” Second, in acts of “moral beauty—the kindness, courage, justice, and humility of others.” And, finally, he says, in natural elements of our life cycles such as “birth, growth, decay, death, and renewal.” We also find awe, according to Keltner, in collective movement, including singing, dancing, and chanting together, as well as in “big ideas” like dark matter, whale communication, music, and the visual patterns of art.
“My lab has found that there’s almost nothing better for a human being than a moment of awe,” Keltner reports, adding that it literally reduces inflammation and regulates heart rate, blood pressure, digestion and breathing. “It makes us more altruistic,” he says. “It combats loneliness…It makes us humble and curious about others. It even decreases ideological polarization around the hot issues of our time. We need more awe.”
In an effort to generate some, Keltner recently helped sponsor a series of 90-minute workshops at Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art entitled “Finding Awe,” in which participants were encouraged to contemplate specific artworks, each for 10 minutes or more.
“In the days after my visit,” columnist Dana Milbank later wrote in The Washington Post, “I found myself pausing to marvel at things I often take for granted: a Christmas fern poking through the snow, the intricate forms of lichens on a tree, a sweet birch clinging to a rocky hillside, the pink and orange in a winter sunset, the power of a house-rattling windstorm. The more you seek awe, the more you find it.”
Which is probably why I chose to build my house on a Northern Mindanao hilltop where, even after eight years, I experience a moment of awe each morning just by looking out my bedroom window. There, stretching placidly before me, lies the Philippine Sea leading all the way to Southern Leyte in the distance. Awesomely framed by luscious green jungle.
The feeling it evokes reminds me of a line I read in a memoir by Virginia Giuffre, the most famous victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious sex abuse. “God is like the wind,” she wrote. “You can’t see it, but you can feel it patting your cheek.”
Unfortunately, Giuffre later committed suicide. Which just shows, I suppose, that a simple pat isn’t always enough; sometimes you need a full gust.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manla Times.
