Soulful Sundays: Awe

“Dwell on the vastness of time and the smallness of your part in it.” -Marcus Aurelius

Seventy-seven years is the average American lifespan, or roughly four thousand weeks. When seen through that lens, the brevity of life quickly comes to the fore, and difficult questions arise. How much of it have we already squandered? What do we still hope to accomplish? And how can we avoid discouragement as we march steadily toward our own endings? Humans have wrestled with these questions since the moment we first became aware of time, yet they have not always been a source of despair. For millennia, cultures have learned to face the fear of death not by denying it, but by inviting it in—by embracing our smallness in the cosmos and seeking moments of awe.

In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman describes a practice he calls cosmic insignificance therapy. It involves stepping outside on a clear night and gazing up at the vast field of stars, reminding ourselves that among roughly two trillion observable galaxies, we live on a small planet orbiting an ordinary star in just one of them. Far from being depressing, Burkeman says this awareness should liberate us—to focus on what truly matters in the limited lifetime we are given, because that is the only thing within our control.

The work of the late Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh echoes this sentiment. He often spoke of the miracle of mindfulness—the realization that time is an illusion only when we allow it to pull us away from the present moment. Too often we find ourselves doing one thing while thinking about another, dividing our attention and feeding the illusion of scarcity. His remedy is simple: do only one thing at a time, until it is completed or until it is time to do something else. In this way, life is fully experienced rather than half-lived amid unlived desires.

To some, Thích Nhất Hạnh’s mindset may seem idealistic. If we are always living in the moment, how are we to plan for the future? His answer lies in the distinction between planning with mindfulness and planning with craving. The former is done with love; the latter, with fear. One is shaped by awe, the other by anxiety. We must plan—it is part of what makes us human—but we must not do so at the expense of our presence.

The practice of mindfulness begins with awe, and awe begins with admitting that we are afraid—afraid, at least in part, to die. The earliest forms of the word awe meant “fear of the gods,” but over centuries it evolved toward “reverence for greatness.” When we name our fear of the unknown, we do two things at once: we declare our smallness in the universe, and we open ourselves to the beauty that surrounds us. No meal tastes sweeter than the one given to the hungry, no water quenches more deeply than that offered to the thirsty, and no moment feels more precious than the one granted to the mortal.

Awe need not belong only to the grand or the rare. It can be found in the smallest of moments—a laugh, a familiar voice on the phone, a crisp autumn day, the setting of the sun, a well-prepared meal, the simple fact of being alive. The odds of any one of us being born are so astronomically small that even contemplating it can bring tears to the eyes. Life itself is the miracle. The more of it we can be conscious for, the richer it becomes.

This very moment contains every bit of happiness we will ever need.

We need only live it.