The Mundane and the Magnificent

Last July and again this December I took the chance to be in landscapes large in rock, sea and sky, which for me always seem to provide a sense of scale in time and space; a sense that can elude me in school term time. Climbing a mountain and gazing across an ocean; getting up close to billion-year old landscapes; marvelling at the night stars. These experiences bring us face to face with something much bigger than our own concerns, which can seem somewhat petty and transient by comparison. The wilderness fix – hardly a novel experience; more a sort of therapy. 

The underlying emotion is awe – that wonderful feeling that psychologists Keltner and Haidt describe as living in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear, and as having two elements: vastness (the experience of something larger than ourselves) and accommodation (the vastness forces us to adjust our mental structures). That first element is familiar, so it’s the second one that I want to explore a little here.

Back now from the Lofoten or Indonesian archipelago and in the midst of budgets, timetables, agendas and the intensity of the school routine, it’s hard not to be struck by the contrast between the intense demands of the minutiae of daily work and family life on the one hand, and the serenity and perspective that comes from the sense of scale looking over an ocean, on the other. The obvious awe is missing in the mundane routines, and it is a problem because it’s so easy to feel that the everyday matters less, that only the magnificent is the real and important stuff of life. We know, furthermore, that feeling that your days are unimportant is a surefire recipe for dissatisfaction with daily life, even depression. Writer David Foster Wallace even goes so far as to say that the single great informing conflict of [modern life] is the conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of their objective insignificance.

Doom and gloom! But the good news is that this perspective is, I think, a mistaken one. The tension is not a feature of only modern life, but actually one that has appeared throughout the ages. Writer Samuel Baron notes that in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels there’s a painting by Bruegel from around 1555, depicting the fall of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and melted his wings. It’s a key story in Western mythology, warning against pride. Bruegel cleverly depicts only the tiny legs of a tiny figure as Icarus plunges into the ocean (look closely – they are hard to find!). The farmer, fisherman, ship, and various animals don’t even register the moment. In his famous poem about this painting, Auden notes they all turn away quite leisurely and that someone on the ship who saw Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Bruegel is calling our attention to being too busy or distracted to be struck by awe. So the feature is not just one of modern life, but a central one of the human condition and to frame it as a recent affliction actually robs the experience of some of its potential. We cannot permanently live in the realm of awe; daily events go on. After enlightenment, the laundry as the Buddhist saying goes. But nor should we be immune to the awesome, the miraculous. And that’s where the accommodation– that necessary element of awe – comes in. Once we have experienced it, once we know what we are looking for, we can find it elsewhere too and we can do our best not to lose it too quickly. The rock, sea and sky may be the most obvious places, but even in a dense urban environment, surely it is available. Appreciating our ties with our most loved one; completing that religious ceremony; holding that new-born infant; walking out of the theatre after a tragic play or movie; getting to the end of a wonderful piece of music; finishing that extraordinary book; we should hold onto these feeling before re-immersing ourselves again in shopping, traffic, chit-chat. We should enlarge our conceptions of certain things, allow ourselves to stand before them, quieted and awed, touched by the eternal.

This is a way of finding some calm in any life – and a busy school is no exception. These ideas may feel a long way away from school life – but they don’t have to be. The same ideas apply – we need not wait for the expeditions to the mountain, sea or desert but can instead embrace the everyday:

• When a school performance is so good that you have to remind yourself that the performers are ‘only’ students, rather than professionals 
• When you see a student puzzling, and then their eyes widen in a classic aha moment, and you know that something has changed for them forever. And when it happens to you, too.
• When a colleague humbly shares a piece of work that she has developed – over an extended period, on top of an intense normal load, and without fanfare – that would not be out of place as an international conference keynote.
• When alumni return and pinpoint a specific moment – that perhaps you cannot even recall – where you said or did something that changed the direction of their life in a positive way.
• When you arrive early thinking you must be the first at school, to find one of the aunties patiently wiping the tables with a palpable sense of pride in her work, despite the fact that no one (apart from you, on this day) ever sees this.
• When you see the student staring wide-eyed at some new idea, struck by its power or beauty
• When you see the new infant school child, who has been clinging to his father, make eye contact with his patiently waiting new teacher, nervously let go, and reach out to bravely follow his new teacher into class. 
• When you realise that for all that remains currently unknown, today’s school curriculum contains knowledge and understandings that were not available to the greatest geniuses for most of human history.
• And most of all, the reason most of us are in the profession and one that grows the longer one stays in it: The wondrous pattern of seeing young children grow – with all the attendant pains and tribulations – into young adults, and then adults, and then parents themselves. We see it for our children, and to be part of it for the thousands of students who pass though the College allows us to connect with something bigger than our own families, and is a constant source of joy and awe.

These are everyday events that could, if we can only allow them, be sources of awe. There will be many others – some unique to us as individuals. The awe which may emerge from a reappraisal of these and other such events is worth cultivating. Surely it is worth making room for it, even – or especially – in our achievement-oriented, SMART goal culture. It may reveal the extent to which any dissatisfaction may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives and experiences rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

With thanks to Ellie Alchin for the conversation.