Awe

Awe

In growing older, we experience more. As a result, simple things go unnoticed. The same red ball that brings a child of two endless enjoyment, we kick out of our way, or curse at it when we trip over it in the middle of the night. We cast it away because we are confident we know all about it. It doesn't intrigue us because we are comfortable with it. We curse at it because we are arrogant enough to believe we are better than it. So, what is bad about that? We know what a ball is, right?

When we look into children, we can see their awe. We can see that they are seeing everything for the first time. And we know that everything that they see is raw, and unmodified by pride or prejudiced. Their eyes are always filled with a certain level of wonder and amazement.

In my eyes, a child embodies the one quality that keeps life trudging on. Awe and wonder. At a point in everybody’s life they lose the ability to be awestruck, or just tend to ignore it if they become so.

Being in a constant state of awe allows for people to get a better understanding of things. Look, for just a minute, at the face of a child in awe. Look right at them the minute that they look in wonder at something. Because for that instant, you will see something that you have lost, but something that you can find again.

You don’t see them trying to consciously comprehend, or forcefully understand. You just see them sitting there gazing at it with a totally open mind. And that is perfection. When you look at something without all of the filters that we have built over eyes for the past years of our lives, you see it in truth.

Awe is base in not knowing something. When faced with something you have two options. 1) Forget about it and ignore it, or 2) try to understand it. In trying to understand something, you will always find something new. Furthering your questioning (awe), always searching, eventually you will come across beauty, and then truth.

On the whole, our people understand and have knowledge over a vast many complex things. The point is: no matter how complex a thing is, it is made of simple things at its root.

To go through life without some form of awe will close many doors in understanding life and its complex things. That may not seem important, but if you can't stare at something with awe and amazement, you will miss its simple beauty.

If you look at things through the same eyes as a child you will become receptive to whatever it is showing you, you must let it come to you. That one of the most important parts of the creative process. Receptivity, the enemy of the ego. Denial, the enemy of awe.