(or Wow, I Am Breathless!)
Most of the time beauty lies in the simplest of things.
—Winna Efendi
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In this chapter, the nature of awe as an experience that sometimes occurs in travel is discussed. Factors that facilitate or impede finding awe are also explored, as well as strategies that travel professionals can use to promote its occurrence.
The Nature of Awe
Traveling, as we have seen, can cause us to experience many different emotions that we do not encounter as much in our day-to-day routines, including the experience of awe. Awe occurs when we ponder something that seems magnificent and wondrous to us, and that in some ways defies our normal categories of description (Allen 2018). It leaves us feeling speechless and can temporality take us out of ourselves (Maslow 1968). It is, in fact, this very self-diminishing aspect of awe that is part of its power. We feel small in a good way because something else seems so grand, large, or exceptionally excellent (Keltner and Haidt 2003).
For example, we may experience a kind of awe as we gaze at something like the Grand Canyon or look at the vastness of an ocean. We may stare at the deep, magnificent blue of some of the colors of stained glass windows in ancient cathedrals or listen to the sounds of a wonderful symphony and really hear it in its full beauty for the first time. When these moments occur, a sort of ah feeling is created that remains stamped in our memories. These experiences can literally take our breath away and give us chills or goose bumps. They can also be transformative in the sense that witnessing something with awe can leave us feeling that we now understand some aspect of our world in a new and expanded way (Elkins 2001). Long after we have forgotten what restaurants we may have eaten in or what train we took to such and such a place, these kinds of experiences of awe stay vivid and bright in our minds.
Experiencing awe is also connected to many positive emotions. For instance, awe facilities a feeling of connection to others and a sense that we are somehow all privileged to be in this magnificent world together (Krause and Hayward 2014). Similar to the flow states that we talked about in the Chapter 13, awe also leads to a kind of self-emptying in which we are temporality unconcerned with ourselves and less burdened by our own issues and problems (Shiota, Keltner and Steiner 2007). In this way, experiencing awe can be very psychologically therapeutic. Awe additionally increases our tendencies to be kind and generous to others, because awe is associated with a feeling of social embeddedness and relatedness.
Although feeling awe is a deeply satisfying experience, sometimes this state is difficult to achieve. To go back to our Grand Canyon example, a trip there could end up being either a magnificent highlight of our lives or a miserable time to endure, depending on many of the factors we have already discussed in this book. For instance, simple exhaustion can interfere with our ability to feel awe and be responsive and receptive to our surroundings. Thus, if we saw the Grand Canyon after a long and tiring trip followed by insufficient sleep, it would be unlikely that we would be able to completely appreciate its beauty. This sort of travel fatigue can be compounded by trying to adhere to schedules that are overcrowded and inappropriately paced, as would likely be the case if we tried to view the entire Grand Canyon, which is huge, as one stop in a multi-stop day of traveling. Our receptivity to awe can be further diminished by engaging in negative comparisons with others that take away our focus on what we, ourselves, are doing or experiencing. As an example of this, imagine that we arrive at the Grand Canyon only to notice that everyone but us seemed to have secured private tour guides to lead them to the most famous parts of the Canyon, or had tickets on a bus to take them to key viewing sites. If we spent our entire day obsessing about this, we might fail to take in the glory of what was right before our eyes. Finally, our ability to experience awe can also be undermined by our cultivation of a ho-hum attitude toward the world that we described earlier, where we feel like we have seen it all and are convinced that nothing is left that can impress us.
Awe, then, while a glorious feeling, can be easily snuffed out if our trips are not structured correctly. This is, again, where good travel planners and providers can be useful. As we have seen, travel professionals can help us organize trips that are not overly tiring and that are well paced. They can assist us in securing accommodations that are restful, and that even include options for restorative spa experiences. Travel planners and providers can also give us access to useful practical information about such things as how we can secure or book tour guides, if we want them, or how we can obtain site transportation tickets, if we need them. Doing these sorts of things in advance would diminish feelings of confusion and uncertainty, which could take away from our ability to fully appreciate the beauty and grandeur that we encounter on our trips, something none of us wants to occur.
Questions for Discussion
Please answer the following questions to think more about the power of awe to add to experiences of travel joy. For these questions, draw on your personal experiences as a traveler and/or on any experiences you have had in the travel industry.
1. Have you ever experienced awe as it was defined in this chapter on some trip that you took in the past? If yes, describe the experience.
2. What do you think prevents us from experiencing awe more during our travels? Explain. What has prevented you from experiencing awe on a past trip?
3. Which of the suggestions for things travel providers might do to promote our ability to experience awe were most interesting to you? Explain. Are there any other strategies that travel providers might use to promote awe that were not brought up in this chapter? If yes, please describe.
4. Do you think, in general, we are a culture that values regarding our surroundings with awe? Why or why not?
Notes