Being in a room full of secondary school Latin teachers opened up a new line of thinking for me that I didn’t know was there. This is why I always enjoy being in a room that I may not quite fit into perfectly because I always ask myself, “What can I learn from this group, or what can I learn from this experience?”

If I didn’t ask myself that, then I’d write off sessions like “Guidelines for Beginning Latin Teachers” as having nothing to do with me. If I did that, I’d close off, unable to see insights I could take with me.

That insight?

Cultivating Awe is a skill adults should practice regularly.

I’m an introvert, a people watcher, and an eavesdropper conversation-observer, so one of my favorite things to do at big events like conferences is observe attendants during the event and see how aligned their energy is with the types of sessions being put on. (I hope that doesn’t make me sound like an absolute creep!)

A few times throughout the conference, I heard repeating descriptors of Latin students, beginning Latin teachers, and established Latin teachers in passing conversations and in a few sessions:

Full of awe; Bright Eyed & BushyTailed; Set-In-Their-Ways

As I said, I don’t show up to ANY event without getting something out of it: whether it’s a new insight or meeting someone interesting. So, though I was a non-Latin Teacher in a conference full of them, I attended as many sessions as possible, even if the title had nothing to do with me on the surface. (Like Guidelines for Beginning Latin Teachers.)

Because I kept my mind open, waiting for writing ideas to emerge, I thought about the progression from awe-inspired student to professional curmudgeon and how that happens to almost all adults.

Awe and wonder are emotions that I think all adults spend their lives seeking to return to but don’t let themselves fully come back to if they're established. (Why should you feel a sense of awe or wonder about your career field if you’ve spent years in it? They may wonder. That will make me look like I don’t know my field well.)

This line of thought usually bleeds into the rest of our lives, both personally and professionally.

And no matter what field that you’re in, whether you’re teaching or in the corporate world like I was or a stay-at-home parent or a caretaker, etc., I think as adults, it’s so easy for us to lose that sense of awe in our own lives.

Awe isn’t something that comes to us as naturally as it did when we were kids. Fear is a much more readily available emotion than awe is after a certain age. Why? Because we can logically explain how the world works and why it works the way it does.

At the same time, we think it’s easier to lose something than to make or gain something.

Producing fear is a skill that becomes overdeveloped as we age.

And awe?

Well, awe gets put onto the back burner or the “someday” part of the never-ending to-do list.

It always takes a backseat to fear.

Joseph Campbell said in one of his lectures:

“Two things bring people together: aspiration and terror.”

I think that’s especially true today. Political campaigns and corporate marketing use fear as their fuel, and I daresay Instagram Influencers do too. (In a subtle, “If your life doesn’t look like mine, then you won’t be happy/pretty/healthy” way.)

So we go on with our fear while our logical brains can explain why the world is the way it is. If you know how something spectacular comes to being and how it operates, is there any room left for awe?

Many people don’t feel that sense of awe when it comes to the possibilities within the world or within themselves because they’re like the curmudgeon professional who’s been doing the same thing in their career in exactly the same way for twenty years.

Like, for example, when it comes to the world, we understand science on a much deeper level than when we were kids. So we understand how a magnificent sunset is produced, and it’s not usually something that brings out awe in us anymore—it doesn’t hold our attention as long as it used to.

Or, on a personal level, we all have done at least one extraordinary thing, but it’s so easy for us to explain away our accomplishments because we were there before, during, and after it. We rationalize it away and move on to the next task before having the chance to really absorb how incredible we are.

And I think that’s the case for any one of us regardless of the field that we’re in. Whether we're working professionals or stay-at-home parents or caretakers, the sense of awe is something that all of us lose naturally as we get older, and it becomes something that we need to cultivate every day actively.

Awe, for adults, is like vitamin D. We don’t produce it naturally, but we need it to make this life more meaningful. We have to add it to our daily lives.

We need to cultivate it.

The other day, I asked my Instagram stories audience how they thought about awe as an adult, and one person responded with something that didn’t occur to me until she said it.

I feel like in school, it’s so easy to have those moments of awe (if you are lucky enough to have those sorts of special teachers who can do that), and I also felt driven to find those moments in school. But I feel like for so long, the norm, especially for women, was that your next awe moment is having a child. Like, “That’s what women do, and nothing is more magical!” kind of messaging. So now that millennials are pushing back on that narrative, people are starting families later, and there’s a new generation of people who don’t have a set path getting those moments of awe.

When I read this, I felt it deeply.

As a woman who has made it very clear early on that I never wanted children, I heard this message all the time. “You’ll never feel that magical first moment after your child is born,” they’d say. “You’ll never feel that true love without a child.”

As we know, “Two things bring people together: aspiration and terror,” and FOMO is a real bitch!

The message I got when people told me this was, “You can’t ever feel intense moments of awe or love unless you’re lucky enough for someone else to give it to you. (like a baby or a spouse.)”

How often does fear, crossed desire for external validation, stop us from experiencing the full potency of life (or the full potency of ourselves)?

Something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about is how differently the world would be if we started our day by cultivating that sense of awe.

What if we didn’t start our day by writing a to-do list and squeezing the most productive bit of ourselves out every minute of every day?

What if, instead, we started the day by cultivating a sense of awe for the world at large and the world within us? How would everything change on a micro and macro level?

For me, a sense of awe used to be like a drug that I’d always tried to find. It’s not something that happens naturally within me, and like I said, it’s something that I have to cultivate.

But because I didn’t know how to cultivate it for myself, awe turned into a high I was always chasing. Thanks to the social conditioning our society puts us through, my thought was that I couldn’t get awe—that true sense of wonder and of being alive—without someone or something gifting it to me, like a new job title or a boyfriend.

I remember being in the corporate world and waking up daily, knowing exactly how every day would go. There would be no deviation, and because there would be no change in my days, I knew that every single day every minute of every day was going to be somewhere on a spectrum from boring to stressful.

I didn’t need to wonder about whether or not I was going to enjoy my day because I knew exactly how the corporate world was, that I hated it, and that there was no hope of changing it, so there was nothing to look forward to.

I was an expert in my day-to-day life. I even knew how everybody around me would act because they were just as miserable as I was. There was no one to give me the gift of feeling truly alive.

I hadn’t developed my skill in cultivating awe. I lived on the surface of my own life because I could explain away everything—being a know-it-all about my own life sent me into a deep depression.

Cultivating awe is a skill that takes time to develop, and I’d say it’s a skill I’m still sharpening.

But now, instead of chasing down the hottest productivity hack, I’m looking for ways to remind myself how incredible even being alive right now is at this moment as I’m writing this to you.

When I first started to take responsibility for my own mindset and to change the way that I felt on a day-to-day basis, I tried lots of different things.

One of the first “solutions” I tried was a gratitude journal. I became obsessed with making the best gratitude journal and journaling in the most effective way possible. It worked for a little bit…Seeing the small things in life that I hadn’t noticed before helped incrementally, but it didn’t have that paradigm-shifting feel that I was so desperate for.

But, again, I was asking the wrong questions. I was still looking at things outside of myself that could create that sense of awe and being alive.

So, how do you actually cultivate awe?

Something that’s worked much better for me is asking myself, “How is the world amazing? What obvious thing do I take for granted now that is actually incredible?”

These are just warm-up questions because they’re still outside of you and your control. You may take a moment to be amazed at how the sun is just close enough to keep the planet warm but not too far to make Earth a frozen rock, but you don’t have control over that.

But these questions are there to get the juices flowing.

The next step is to ask, “How am *I* amazing? What’s an obvious thing about me that I take for granted that is actually incredible?”

It’s very easy to throw your hands up and say, “I don’t know.” But the effectiveness of these open-ended questions lies in the specificity of your answers. This is unfamiliar territory, and our brains don’t like to spend much time thinking through seemingly complicated things if we don’t have to.

Like, no one is forcing you to see how incredible you really are, and the only one to hold you to answer that question is you—unless you have a personal coach!

But the secret is making yourself come up with an answer to those questions, no matter what, every damn day until it becomes second nature.

And once you’re in the rhythm of doing that, add one more question:

“How can I create/do/be/experience something amazing for myself today?”

If you stuck with that long enough, I bet you’ll start to feel that delicious paradigm shift—and feel in awe at your own mind.

xx,

Monica

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