What the ding??!!

Non-stop awe in a shit-storm year

This morning I taught my son about negative numbers. He asked whether there was a “Twelfth Grade” (There is! His cousin is in it!). “Whoah!” he exclaimed. I told him that I had made it up to, by my calculation, the 23rd grade, and in his wide-eyed look I saw all the hundreds of textbooks I had purchased and discarded, a few important lessons, and a lot of sleeping in class. But to him, it was almost like having made it to the moon. He asked what grade he was going into next year, and we agreed that Kindergarten was the equivalent of “Grade Zero.” Naturally, we discovered that he is now in grade “Negative One!” (“We HAVE to tell dada!”) and his sister in grade “Negative Three!”

I didn’t wake up today planning on pulling back the curtain on the mathematical universe, but when you spend all of your time with a five-year-old, such things are always a possibility. He hears the word “nylons” in a Beverly Cleary book from the 50s, is dumbstruck that I am in possession of a pair of such things, and wears them to bed for three consecutive nights, letting everyone know that he is being careful not to “make a run” in them. We pick up trash on our street with his robot arm — he marvels at how much of it there it is, at how pesky a cigarette butt is to get a hold on, at what quick work the wind can make of a pile of napkins. He leaves a note at the neighborhood fairy door and when the fairy (played with incredible dedication by our neighbor Allison) actually writes back, all he can do for an hour is gaze into the distance and mutter to himself the phrase “I guess fairies are real.” We have a popular family phrase for amazement, “What the ding???!” and it gets a lot of usage around here.

Some little boys want to be superheroes - mine wants to be an 80s office secretary named Janice

In grad school (the 22nd grade, to be exact), when I wasn’t sleeping in class or reading books I would soon discard, I finagled a dissertation fellowship through the lovely people at the Greater Good Science Center. One of the other fellows was researching a topic I didn’t know one could research: awe. He was working on a study wherein he elicited the feeling of awe in participants by showing them a short video of a sunrise. He measured the feelings of happiness and gratitude in the sunrise-watchers, and compared it to a placebo group who did something else I can’t remember but that was decidedly not awe-inspiring, perhaps reading a review of films about women by someone who obviously hates both women and film. There I was, trying to figure out how to prevent serious mental health challenges in young children, and this dude was showing people sunrises. It all seemed a little too Burning Man for me.

But as we come up on our “pand-iversary,” a year of almost nothing but myself, my husband, and two children who alternate between calling me “Bad Mom!!” and asking if they can pretend to nurse, I keep returning to what my ol’ classmate, and many other researchers since then, have discovered about the magical psychological powers of awe. Experiences of awe have been found to make people more humble, generous, patience, satisfied, connected, and gulp, healthy. Dacher Keltner, who I have just at this moment nicknamed “The Awefather,” describes awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.” Awe seems to have more powerful effects than feelings like, say, amusement, because experiences of awe are not just nicey-nice, but “redefine the self in terms of the collective” and “stimulate wonder and curiosity.” My fave study found that tourists at Yosemite (awe city) drew more positive self-portraits than tourists at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf (sad sad fog-filled consumer-town, unless you are my friend Dan and make this the setting for your family’s annual “Yes Day”).

During a rare adult chitty-chat with my step-brother this weekend, we spoke, as parents often do this year and in others, about our friends without kids. “I’m not saying I don’t love mine” he said, “but if we did this year without kids, I think we’d be having a great time.” It was hard to argue with that. I sometimes feel so buried in my children these days, in my involuntary, all-encompassing servitude to them in the absence of most anyone else, that I think I might claw my own eyes out. I fantasize, daily, about not having children. About not knowing what to do with my free time. About taking up woodworking, or attending a virtual art exhibit, or driving off into the distance, blasting Yo La Tengo, until some border officer wakes me from my sacred solitude.

I even fantasize, at times, about being lonely. Of course, loneliness is its own involuntary servitude, one I have felt and can almost remember enough to not seriously envy. But I would choose this again, not that anyone is asking. I would take the kids any day. I’ve thought what made it all worth it was the purpose of child-rearing, the meaning, the being needed. Or perhaps the company. Or even, the fun.

But I’m pretty sure the thing that evens out the rage, the regret, the unbelievable tedium of raising little children, probably ever, but especially this year, is awe. Just when I’m sure the world is at best one exhausting, expensive trip to Fisherman’s Wharf, and at worst, a steaming pile of gorilla shit, someone exclaims that the hummingbird is outside our window again. Or we discover that, if you put a Han Solo action figure in an old yogurt container filled with water and stick it in the freezer, it looks like it’s frozen in Carbonite, or that a “Y” is just a “V’ with pants on. It’s like a thousand little sunrises, playing in my head, all day long. And I’m not gonna lie, it’s fucking awesome.

He doesn’t seem as worried as the original, but then again, it all works out in the end.

Thanks for reading, please comment with any and everything. And share this newsletter if you fancy it. And if you happen to know Dacher Keltner, please now refer to him, as publicly as possible, as The Awefather.