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To get your head out of your arse, look at a tree

Moments of awe can nourish us creatively (and make us feel more human)

Hello, stranger! How have you been? Welcome back to Cosmic Latte, a weekly dispatch of tips and inspiration for the world’s bravest people – freelance creatives.

Each edition we’ll be exploring a different idea followed by a prompt to get you in the mood to create. This week considers how awe-inspiring experiences can make us more creative. Let’s get started.

* turns on milk steamer *

✨ about that tree…

One morning a few weeks ago, after a fairly intense period of client work, I sat myself down to get started on the next project. With everything urgent dispatched, the road ahead was clear and full of possibility. It should have been exhilarating. Instead, I felt cynical and… weary. This again?

Weeks of keeping my nose to the grindstone (that is, the Designed in California grindstone with a Retina display and backlit keyboard) had made the rest of the world disappear. I was folding in on myself, the world had become narrow and dark and… well, you read the headline. I don’t need to go any further.

zooming out, tapping in

I took myself to the biggest, greenest place I could find within about an hour’s journey – a botanical garden – and decided to see what happened.

After a few hours of walking, reading, and watching a couple of goldcrests go about their day, I felt I’d got what I came for – decompression, clarity, a tiny little sense of rebellion as this all happened on a Thursday afternoon, when I “should have” been working (oh bondage, up yours). And then I found the tree.

It was one of those trees that looks so primeval you half expect a pterodactyl to fly from its branches (it was a cedar, or Cedrus deodara, tree fans). Going up to have a closer look, peering through its canopy, observing countless ants criss-crossing its bark, the world started to come back.

I felt so comforted by this tree, a sense of peace. It’s been around for so long, and will be around long after I’m gone. To that tree, I’m just another ant. When I reflected on the moment, I realised what I’d experienced was awe.

What actually is awe? According to researchers Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, who have been studying awe for more than two decades, there are two components to it: “perceived vastness”, and a “need for accommodation”. In other words, it’s a feeling of being in the presence of something much greater than yourself that you don’t immediately understand.

It’s thought that our capacity for awe has an evolutionary advantage – it binds us to social groups and makes us behave more collaboratively.

awe makes us kinder and more curious

This bears out in the science. One study by Michelle Shiota and Keltner (a consultant on the Inside Out movies, by the way) at UC Berkeley found that participants that were primed with awe, in this case by standing in front of a T. rex skeleton, were more likely to define themselves as part of a collective than as an individual. In another study, those who had recently experienced awe were more helpful to a person in need.

Awe can also spark our wonder and curiosity, perhaps making us more creative. One study found that those who had seen videos of “expansive images of Earth” came up with more original responses when asked to name items in a specific category.

yes i’d like some awe please 🐧

So… how do you invite more awe into your life? According to Keltner and Haidt, experiences of awe are especially elicited by nature, art, and impressive people, as well as “acts of great skill and virtue”.

The experience doesn’t have to involve something enormous, like my tree, or require a long journey to an extraordinary landmark. It can be found a lot closer to home, such as by listening to beautiful music, moving in unison with others, or watching Chris Packham pacing an ancient rock formation. This article by Psyche lists eight ways to experience more ‘wow’.

Standing at the foot of that tree on a grey afternoon, everything felt a lot lighter. I was forced to zoom out, stop ruminating, and crucially, get my head out of my arse.

⚡ five minutes, here we go

In five minutes, free write or sketch something based on the following prompt:

What food did you love as a child that you haven’t had since? What did the anticipation of eating it feel like? What did it taste like? Do you think you’d have the same experience of it now?

🤖 input more input

Last week I finally got round to watching Jack Rooke’s gorgeous series Big Boys (Channel 4, Netflix), which follows unlikely friends Jack and Danny and their coming-of-age shananigans over their first year of university. Keep tissues at hand.

Yoko Ono’s retrospective at the Tate Modern floored me – I found the works that invited participation particularly moving (and in one particular case, so, so beautiful), leaving with what felt like permission to go! create! add your voice!

☕ extra shot

“In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, – no disgrace, no calamity... which nature cannot repair.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)

See you next week, gang! Have fun today x