The same sky. The same quality of light. The same clarity. This is my view many mornings and many evenings when I am in Clover Valley.
Quite a bit of research has been done over the last century on the concept of happiness. It’s a topic of interest because happiness doesn’t follow the same rules as other cause and effect studies. You can test the stimuli/reward/response behavior in laboratory mice, but they can’t give you feedback on how they feel about it all. We can tell if they’re well-fed, but we can’t know if they’re happy.
Happiness has been elusive, both in people and in scientific studies. It’s a qualitative study, not a quantitative one.
Research has narrowed down a few things that promote happiness: close relationships, work you love to do, acts of service, and expressing gratitude are chief among them. But those things don’t always guarantee happiness or satisfaction in life. There’s another element, a base that underpins the actions, which is proving more and more to be the secret to happiness. And it’s not something you do so much as it is how you see the world.
The key to happiness is awe.
The feeling of smallness when you stand beside the ocean. The feeling of humility when you hold a newborn in your arms. The feeling of wonder when you lie on your back in midsummer and see the expanse of the cosmos over your head, the endlessness of the stars from horizon to horizon. The feeling of immense vastness that touches you, but which can’t quite be grasped when you kneel in prayer and come heart to heart with God. The feeling, as Neil deGrasse Tyson once explained: “I look up at the night sky and I know that we are part of this universe. We are in this universe. But perhaps more importantly than both of these facts is that the universe is in us.”
I look out on this scene when I am here and it amazes me. It’s like living in a painting. Though I’ve been present for over 8,765 sunrises and 8,765 sunsets, they have never become mundane. They have never seemed ordinary to me. There have been times when I’ve looked up at the sky with a broken heart, a sorrowing spirit, and a mind overwhelmed with the weight of all that was “wrong” in that moment. And still the sky has lifted me out of myself. Putting my problems in perspective with our revolution around the sun, the changing of the seasons, and the precession of the Earth.
My preoccupation with an unkind word feels very small by comparison. Not unimportant, but not important enough to alter the stars. Awe is a magnification process, not a minimizing one. In all that magnification of the good, I can see the bad more clearly. I can recognize it for what it is, change what I can, and let go of the rest. Knowing that, standing in awe of that, has kept me grounded when anger, hurt, and sorrow has opened a black hole in my heart; an empty space that could consume everything good in my life and leave nothing but devastation behind.
That is the power of awe. The power behind the counsel to “Be still, and know that I Am God.”
Happiness isn’t found in what we have, happiness is in how we see the world.
Share this:
