A couple of weeks ago I found myself sat in the Lochmaddy Hotel on North Uist, rain streaming down the windows, killing time before catching the ferry back to Skye. It was the final day of a four week jaunt around Scotland and, as inevitably happens when a journey comes to an end, I found myself reflecting on the highlights of the previous 28 days.
I’d seen so much. Too much to recall in just one sitting but some notable experiences nonetheless stood out: exploring the cavernous space of Smoo Cave; standing below some of the tallest trees in the country at Reelig Glen; marvelling at the vast waterworld of North Uist from the summit of Eaval; watching the Northern Lights in Ardnamurchan; navigating through a whiteout on Arkle; watching a storm batter the Outer Hebrides; or seeing the Milky Way arcing above Oldshoremore.
The Milky Way over Oldshoremore in Sutherland. Always a humbling sight.
Thinking about those experiences it was suddenly glaringly obvious that they had all made me feel small. They had required words like ‘humbled’ and ‘jaw-dropping’ when I described them on social media. And then I realised there was a more appropriate word I could have used to describe the emotion I felt at each of those experiences: awe.
What is awe?
For me, awe is something beyond simple beauty. It’s something infrequent that stops me in my tracks and makes me stare. Awe draws more than just a ‘wow’ from my mouth, provokes more than just a pavlovian click of the camera and, above all, I can’t tear myself away from it because it sparks profound thought or contemplation. Put simply, an awe-inspiring experience stands out a mile.
But while huge objects and beautiful spectacles that physically stand out are perhaps the most obvious source of awe, such as that extraordinary display of nacreous clouds we all saw in February, we can also be awed by the opposite.
On Stob Ghabhar last year I caught sight of a ludicrously iridescent ground beetle that was easily the most beautifully coloured organism I’d ever seen in the Scottish uplands. It was tiny but it still stopped me in my tracks. I spent 20 minutes or so in its company and, as it walked over my hand I marvelled at its improbability, its intricacy and above all its resilience on that cold, snowy hillside.
A ludicrously and improbably iridescent encounter on Stob Ghabhar. Just as awe-inspiring as the bigger things in life.
When the beetle and I finally parted company I left with that same feeling of awe I might get from a spectacular sunset, a raging storm or watching 90,000 puffins buzzing over the Isle of May. Seriously! I’d therefore describe awe as the sense of being belittled in the face of something that, whether by its physical, emotional or philosophical presence, overwhelms us.
This apparently means that during my tour of Scotland I deliberately went out of my way to feel belittled and overwhelmed. But why? What is there to be gained from being belittled? What has awe ever done for us?
What has awe ever done for us?
It’s a question that has been given considerable attention in academic circles, as I found out when I accidentally stumbled upon a recent scientific study called….. ‘Awe and Social Behaviour amid a grove of towering trees’. I kid you not!
The study starts by summarising current scientific opinion on how awe affects us mentally. By making us feel small, awe makes us think we have more available time, which in turn enhances our sense of wellbeing. It makes us feel we are part of something larger than ourselves, making us less focused on day to day concerns, and it reduces the significance we attach to those concerns because they suddenly seem trivial when they’re shown to be a small part of a much bigger picture. Furthermore, the study claims that experiencing awe can positively affect our social behaviour and turn us into better citizens!
Me being humbled below some of the tallest trees in the country, at Reelig Glen near Inverness.
A mere 60 seconds of exposure to an awe-inspiring sight, in this case a grove of 200ft tall trees, made the study’s test subjects more helpful in a staged accident that occurred just moments later, and made them more ethical when confronted with a moral dilemma such as whether to keep or return money accidentally given to them. It also lowered their sense of entitlement in a test where the participants were asked to state the monetary figure they felt they were owed for their participation in the study.
The study concludes that by making us feel small and insignificant, awe broadens our horizons to make us look beyond just ourselves, which in turn enables us to display more of what the researchers call ‘prosocial behaviour’, ie being nice, moral people whose selfish impulses are toned down and who then work more cooperatively with others.
That’s a tantalising and attractive idea, don’t you think? That by simply taking a walk in the countryside, of sitting on a hilltop bench and appreciating the expansive panorama, we could unwittingly be becoming better people. Less self-absorbed, more considerate of others, more understanding of our place in the universe.
But now it’s time for a disclaimer. Much as I’d like to think that you could take a miserly grouch with no regard for anyone but themselves up a mountain, sit them down in front of an awesome panoramic view for 60 seconds and then witness them undergo a miraculous Scrooge-like transformation into the world’s most altruistic person…..it’s just not going to happen. The study’s results found the increases in prosocial behaviour to be marginal rather than dramatic, but they were nonetheless significant enough to indicate that there is definitely something positive happening to us when we experience awe.
Still, there surely has to be some kind of predisposition to being awed by the natural world, although I’m not sure what fosters that predisposition, whether its nature, nurture or both. Certainly for a great many people you could stand them at the bottom of a magnificent 200ft tree and they’d say…..’Okay, it’s a tree. So what?’
It depends very much on who we are, what we do, where we’ve been and what we’ve seen. What awes one person won’t necessarily awe someone else, but if awe truly can make us better people and not everybody is predisposed to experiencing it in a natural setting, thank goodness it can be obtained through other means such as spirituality, sport, gigs, architecture, history, science etc.
Being humbled yet again, this time in Smoo Cave in Sutherland.
I’ve certainly experienced my fair share of awe away from the natural world. I was in London a year ago and stood at the foot of the Shard, Europe’s tallest office block, utterly mesmerised by the dizzying view. I was awed as a child and still am today when I see improbably huge hulks of metal lifting off runways. Micro SD cards, matches, standing stones, Victorian engineering, the knowledge and experience of David Attenborough, I’m in awe of all of them and more. And yet as someone well used to experiencing awe in natural surroundings, I think I would have believed that the kind of awe experienced through a man made, non natural setting just couldn’t have the same beneficial effects as that experienced through a positive encounter with nature. But the study found this not to be the case.
All experiences of awe had a similar effect on people’s generosity and ethical behaviour, regardless of whether the source was natural or unnatural. Moreover, it didn’t seem to matter if the awesome sight being experienced was perceived as negative by the test subjects, namely threatening natural phenomena like tornados, erupting volcanos and other natural disasters. Even though the emotional responses in those instances included fear or anxiety, the feelings of smallness or insignificance were the same as in other experiences of awe, and they generated equally positive behavioural responses thereafter. Awe appears to be awe regardless of where or how you encounter it, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant.
Sticking my awe in
But this is a nature column when all is said and done, so you’re surely expecting me to come down on the side of the natural world in the end…..and I’m not going to disappoint! Because study or no study, I wholeheartedly and stubbornly believe in nature’s special ability to inspire awe way beyond anything of human design or origin.
That belief isn’t just inspired by nature’s physical complexity or scale. It is also inspired by the vastness of time, which in Scotland is laid bare by fossils that are 300 million years old and rocks that are even older. Placing my hand in a three-toed dinosaur footprint on the Isle of Skye, left behind when some enormous monster trotted across a muddy plain 160 million years beforehand, fixes me in a sequence of events so vast that my tiny brain can barely conceive of it.
I walk through glens that were sculpted by ice a mile thick. I see stars in the sky that may well have already died a spectacular death but still they shine bright because it takes so long for their light to cross the empty vacuum of space and reach us here on Earth. These things blow my mind in a way that vast buildings, ancient artefacts and remarkable feats of endurance, faith or courage just can’t do.
Possibly the most humbled I have ever been. Placing my hand in a 160 million year old dinosaur footprint on the Isle of Skye. Mind blowing!
The awe I feel when I spend two hours atop the highest point on North Uist, or standing below the Milky Way, or sat watching an adder for an hour, fosters greater respect for our wild places and our wildlife, helping me to see them as precious and worthy of protection. That remarkable feeling of insignificance, of being so small before something so vast is what keeps my scales weighted firmly in favour of the environment over the economy, in favour of nature over man, ultimately underpinning my firm belief that the natural world has dominion over us and not the other way around. Because while civilisations come and go, and homo sapiens doubtless will too, the great natural cycles of creation, extinction, evolution, erosion and deposition all carry on regardless.
Nature is, in the truest sense of the word, awesome.