And yet.
A team of psychologists, of which Piff himself was part, wanted to study the effect of awe on ‘prosocial behaviour’, the behaviour we display when we put other people’s interests before our own. They took a group of students into a wood, and invited them to look at some majestic trees for a minute. When asked what they felt, the students reported high levels of awe.
The psychologists then ran some tests. For example, one of them dropped a bunch of pens apparently out of clumsiness. He then counted how many pens the students helped him to pick up. Also, the students were asked how much money they thought they deserved for participating in the experiment.
The experimenters ran the same tests on a second group, the only difference being that they placed this second group in front of an unremarkable tall building, where they did not report high levels of awe.
The first group, who had felt awe, helped the experimenters to pick up more pens than the second group, and asked for less money. They had become appreciably keener to help, and less entitled, after one meagre wonder-filled minute.3 Just think what effect a lifetime of wonder could have.
And this is why wonder is shunned.
It challenges the dispiriting notion that selfishness and greed is humanity’s default setting. A minute of wonder is enough to show that this is not a dog-eat-dog world if we don’t make it so: being small-minded is a choice, not a necessity. A re-enchanted world would have less space for the hatred on which so many politicians and media moguls are feeding.
Before I let you go, let me tempt you with three quick ideas on how to use your new sense of wonder to make the world a slightly better place. These are three portals to open with your keys. I am sure you will discover more of your own.
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The first portal is Creativity. We can define it as the capacity to find new ideas that work. It takes creativity to write a good novel, it takes creativity to fix a flawed relationship, or to find a fairer way of running a country. To be truly creative, new ideas have to get the job done better than the old ones.
Being creative is hard because of something we discovered in our journey: we have locked ourselves in a very narrow reality. We look at the world through the distorting prism of the stories we have been told, and we believe that prism shows us the world as it is. We even train our senses to be less sharp than they would be naturally, so as not to dispel that illusion. We live in a cramped box, which cuts us off from a large part of our astounding universe.
In order to be creative, we need, first, to fully accept that we live in that box; second, to map its boundaries; and third, to look for effective ways of extending them. When, in 2004, the novelist Susanna Clarke published Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, she believed it was possible to write a fairy tale in the way Jane Austen would have written one, had she written such stories. Clarke’s publisher believed that a literary fantasy novel could find a large audience (a point of view that many ‘sensible’ people might have said lacked supporting evidence) and printed a huge number of hardbacks. The book was a critical and financial success, and quickly came to be considered a classic. Believing that such a book was possible in the first place took a breathtaking amount of good ideas at all levels of the production process. It took chutzpah too.
Wonder makes us find the ideas, and gives us the chutzpah.
With a heightened sense of wonder, you are always aware that you live in a box, no matter how big it is. You keep pushing against its walls; you never stop questioning what you think you know, you never stop sailing against the current of common sense, you cultivate doubt about what others consider the most obvious certainties. An enchanted life is organically creative.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously identified a state of mind he called ‘flow’, in which we are completely focused on the task at hand. In a state of flow, we create our best work.4 We can write ten thousand good words in a day, or break a world record at the Olympics, or solve an elusive equation; or have the kind of mind-blowing sex that makes you wobble for a week afterwards. In a state of flow, it is easier to be focused than distracted. The secret to flow is engagement: to be in flow is to be fully engaged with what we are doing.
We cannot generate a state of flow at will, but a heightened sense of wonder gives us a profound level of engagement with life that makes flow more likely to happen. When you understand that everything around you carries the seeds of the new and the unique, and that every situation you encounter is different, that level of engagement becomes second nature to you.
It will still take an effort to come up with good ideas, and test them, and discard those that are not effective. But that effort forms part of the adventure of discovery, and as such it will be bearable. Susanna Clarke took ten years to write Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and her publishers took a huge financial gamble with it, a gamble they could have lost regardless of the novel’s quality. I am sure that Clarke endured many sleepless nights, and her editor at least as many; I am sure that her agent anticipated publication day with a mixture of elation and terror – that day was for everyone involved truly a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
Susanna Clarke and the people around her opened themselves to the mystery, and thus made something extraordinary happen. As witches do; as we have learned to do.
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The second portal is Stress. In a study of high achievers in different fields, from the military to the arts, the psychologist Angela Duckworth observed that they all have one quality in common, which she called ‘grit’.5 High achievers were not necessarily cleverer or more talented than other people, but they were persistent. They were the ones who, after suffering a setback, would bounce back and try again; and then, when they suffered another setback, they would bounce back from that as well; and so on. High achievers can cope with stress.
This attitude is necessary if we are to see through to completion every long-term task we set ourselves. A marriage requires grit, writing a novel requires grit, making our organization more environmentally sustainable requires grit. There are other factors that might help one to succeed (a privileged background and luck, to name two), but whereas other factors we cannot control, we can strengthen our levels of grit.
In 1990, England were playing Cameroon in the quarter-final of the World Cup, a match that would become legendary. England were losing 2–1 when they were awarded a penalty. The responsibility of taking it fell to the striker Gary Lineker. He was under an immense amount of stress. He dealt with it by embracing it in full. Before he took the penalty kick, Lineker thought about how wonderful it was to be there, to be playing for his country, and becoming part of the history of his chosen sport; the pressure he was feeling was part of the game, it was part of the beauty of the situation. Lineker went on to score with his penalty, and then, for good measure, to score a second goal, and England won.6
A sense of wonder does not make stress go away, but rather it helps us to engage with stress productively, and so turn it into an ally.
Sometimes that won’t be enough. The story of Lineker in the Cameroon game has the kind of happy ending we like. We love the story of J. K. Rowling and of how, after her first Harry Potter had been rejected for not being ‘commercial’ enough, she eventually found a publisher for it and went on to achieve wealth and success beyond dreams, to turn millions of children the world over into book readers, and to found a charitable trust to fight poverty and disease. It’s a true story, and an uplifting one.