By Zahra Minal Khan
“How just looking up and allowing made me realize…. The World was still there.”
I recently shifted homes to a quieter, greener place, with a hill that features a beautiful building that rises like a soft shoulder right in front of my balcony. For weeks, people who visited told me how lucky I was, they admired the balcony as if it were a painting hung for display, click worthy – oh, you must love that view, they said, and took a quick snap in their phones. And I believed I would, I’d say – yeah yeah, I do feel lucky, I imagined myself drinking tea with the trees, pausing between work calls to watch the light change on the hill, maybe I will feel that sudden green would spill into my days, I will feel calmer, maybe more present, maybe more alive. I thought awe would arrive automatically….Maybe.
But when I finally sat on my balcony, really sat, I noticed the embarrassing part. I wasn’t looking at the hill at all. My thumb kept moving over the phone like it had a job of its own, constant mails, reels, messages, overcharged laptop balanced nearby — the digital drip never seems to stop, it fractured my attention into smaller and smaller pieces. The green was right there, patiently, offering itself gently, but I was scrolling past it, the way I scroll past so many things now.
I know it isn’t just me. We all travel far, far away only to stand in front of a scenic beauty and immediately lift our phones. Take 27 or some 50 photos of it. Do we see the thing or even the person, or do we just see the picture of them, for later? I’m a big moon-clicker – always have been, always will be but when I scroll through those silver dots later, I feel a strange ache. I’ve collected hundreds of moons but rarely looked at the real one for five uninterrupted minutes. Not once did I remain still enough for awe to root in my body and unfold its quiet work.
We take photographs for us to remember and cherish later, as if the act of remembering is more important than the act of being there. I don’t let the moon work on me. I capture it and move on. This makes me come to the realization that we do the same with people around us.
Awe, scientists now say, is one of the few emotions that reliably pulls us out of ourselves. Psychologists describe awe as a feeling that makes us feel small in a good way, not small in a diminishing way, but small the way you feel standing under a sky full of stars or hearing that one song that touches a place inside you that words can’t reach. In those moments, the boundaries of our self will loosen its grip we become part of something larger.
Research indicates that awe binds us to our environment and with one another. It stimulates the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter linked with pleasure, reward, thinking, movement, and motivation. Awe, according to science, is not performative (as the trend goes these days) or decorative. It is regulating and necessary. And yet, there I was, surrounded by green, by people, and I was just untouched by it.
What surprises me is how suddenly starved we’ve become for this feeling. Awe is everywhere, studies insist it is in the skies, music, art, human kindness – and yet I would think that lived life is not a laboratory. On days when the mind feels stretched thin, the body is tired, and it becomes harder to receive anything soft or beautiful. Digital fatigue has already settled into us like a second skin; the constant notifications, pings replace presence, and we move through our days carrying invisible weights. So, I keep returning to this contradiction, awe may be available, it is proven to come automatically, but we are not always available to it. Maybe this is our modern stoicism – not the ancient philosophy of endurance, but a quiet emotional bracing, a way of getting through the day without fully feeling it. Suppose I am in excruciating pain one day and you make me meet Shah Rukh Khan, I LOVE Shahrukh Khan, and of course I would feel that sudden rush of awe when I would see him, that dopamine-driven suspension of pain in the moment but later I might still tell the story with a caveat, the day would have been perfect if my body hadn’t been hurting. That’s how pain works. It doesn’t erase awe, but it competes with it, sometimes dulling what could have been fully received. Awe may briefly take over, but suffering leaves its residue, reminding us that wonder is felt through the body as much as through the eyes.
So, we begin searching for something more solid. Concepts of “Urban tribes,” no-phone meetups, handwritten letter evenings, silent walks, community art circles, device-free dinners – anything that lets them be seen without the filter of performance (not performative). There’s a quiet movement towards the present, as if we are trying to remember something we once knew in the past.
One evening, I stepped onto the balcony empty-handed, as the sun began to set, a building in the distance at the top of the hill caught the light and started to glow bright, like impossible gold. I called my aunt to the balcony and pointed it out proudly. She smiled and told me a story of a village, where people once believed a building on the hill turned golden at sunset because it was filled with real gold. Some even went looking for it, convinced they could collect the treasure. “The gold isn’t real,” she said. “It is just the light, darling.”
And maybe that is the whole essence of awe – it doesn’t last, it doesn’t wait, and it doesn’t repeat. It simply asks for presence, for a life lived with the eyes open. The rest is just a memory, a photograph, a reflection. The real thing always happens before we record it.
That evening, the light faded slowly, the gold disappeared, and the hill returned to its ordinary self. Awe didn’t stay, but something else did. A softness. A reminder….. Awe waits for us like that hill outside my balcony – calm, unbothered, offering itself again and again.
“If the world and its people could remain within a frame like a painting on the wall, I think we’d see the beauty then and stand staring in awe.” – Conor Oberst.
Zahra Minal Khan is a Psychologist and mental well-being practitioner interested in the quiet intersections of science, art, and everyday human experience.
References Explained:
1. Psychology Today – The Wonders of Awe
“Psychologists describe awe as one of the few emotions that reliably pulls us out of ourselves.” For direct reflection of reduced self-focus.
“It makes us feel small — not diminished, but connected — the way you do under a star-filled sky…” This reflects Psychology Today’s framing of ‘small self’ without shame.
“In those moments, the boundaries of the self loosen.”
(paraphrased in the article).
2. BBC Worklife – Awe: The Little Earthquake That Could Free Your Mind
“Awe may be available, but we are not always available to it.” It is a description of a restatement of awe being present but out-of-the-way under cognitive overload.
“Awe would briefly suspend the pain… but suffering leaves its residue.” This echoes the BBC’s idea of awe as a temporary ‘earthquake’.
3. Greater Good Science Center (UC Berkeley) – A Scientific Review of Awe
“Research shows awe binds us to our environment and to each other.” For the direct translation of the social bonding study.
“It triggers dopamine, the neurotransmitter linked with pleasure, motivation, thinking, and movement.” Clear neurobiological reference.
“Awe is not decorative or performative; it is regulating, even necessary.” Clear reflection of awe’s direct and prosocial function.
4. The Contradictions that I added.
“Pain doesn’t erase awe; it competes with it.” This is my personified and observed counterpoint to the idealized findings.
“Maybe this is our modern stoicism.” Abstract expansion, not exactly present in the research, but grounded in it.
References and Links:
- Chatterjee, A. (2022, November 21). The wonders of awe. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-cultures/202211/the-wonders-of-awe](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-cultures/202211/the-wonders-of-awe
- Greater Good Science Center. (2021). Awe: A scientific review (White paper). University of California, Berkeley.
https://ggsc.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/GGSC-JTF_White_Paper-Awe_FINAL.pdf](https://ggsc.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/GGSC-JTF_White_Paper-Awe_FINAL.pdf
- Yong, E. (2022, January 3). Awe: The little earthquake that could free your mind. BBC Worklife. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220103-awe-the-little-earthquake-that-could-free-your-mind](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220103-awe-the-little-earthquake-that-could-free-your-mind
