Experiencing Awe: How Travel and Learning Shift Perspective
- Awe is a powerful emotional experience that helps quiet the mind, reduce stress, and foster a sense of connection to something larger than ourselves.
- Scientific research shows that experiencing awe can increase generosity, perspective and emotional well-being.
- Travel and lifelong learning create natural opportunities for awe by placing us in environments that inspire reflection and wonder.
- Especially in uncertain times, moments of awe can help us regain clarity, calm and a renewed sense of meaning.
Experiencing Awe
Dear Friends,
Not long ago, a message came in from a Road Scholar participant who recently returned from Australia. She wrote to say that as she stood before Uluru — the massive sandstone formation rising from the red desert — she was overcome by a feeling she hadn’t felt in a long time. Awe. Beholding this otherworldly formation in the middle of a glowing desert lifted her far beyond the moment, beyond time and beyond place. “I felt transported,” she wrote.
Awe. It’s a word we don’t often use in our daily lives. We talk about being impressed, or pleased or even inspired. But awe is different. It stops us. It widens our view. It reminds us that the world is larger, older and more mysterious than ourselves, our lives and the concerns that tend to fill our days.
Scientists In recent years have begun to study the phenomenon of awe more closely and have found that moments of awe can quiet the mind, reduce stress and increase our sense of connection to others. People who experience awe regularly are more likely to feel generous — more likely to feel part of a larger whole.
Being in awe changes us.
And that’s why it matters so much, especially during times when life is so unsettled by events far beyond our control. Stepping beyond our concerns into a place like Uluru — or a cathedral, or a coastline, or a forest older than memory — takes us beyond ourselves and reminds us life is an opportunity to experience feelings bigger than any one moment.
Learning and travel, at their best, give us access to these feelings. Not as an escape from the world, but as a way of seeing it more clearly. Our participant didn’t say that standing before Uluru solved anything. But something in her sense of reality shifted. She gained perspective and a sense of calm she hadn’t expected.
At Road Scholar, we believe in the power of learning and discovery. But perhaps just as important is the power of feeling, of standing in a place that invites you to pause, to reflect, to sense yourself as part of something larger than our lives, than ourselves.
We all need those moments. Perhaps, now more than ever. Moments to remind us to see the world — and our place in it — more clearly.
