The key to happiness: Locals weigh in on the power of awe, and where they find it

A few months ago, while at my computer, I was pulled into a spiral of negativity on social media. I felt myself tense up and began to carry the weight of the topic (which I don’t even remember now) on my shoulders; tingles of heat rose up my neck, I was stuck between wanting to engage and needing to run away.

I chose to pivot and looked for a podcast to take my mind off things.

“This Scientist Says One Emotion Might Be the Key to Happiness,” was the title I came across, scrolling through the most recent offerings on my phone.

I bit. Sure, I thought. If I could be so quickly affected by a stranger’s ramblings on social media, there had to be an opposite, unexpected moment of joy waiting for me.

I leaned in. I listened to Dacher Keltner, a prominent “happiness researcher,” and his belief that happiness just might be… all around us. Living the good life, he said, boils down to one thing, and that one thing is finding awe.

A professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, Keltner describes awe as the feeling/emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries, like especially large trees, people whose generosity astounds us, or incredible music. Awe is a positive emotion that both excites you and leaves you speechless, Keltner said, and is oftentimes found in extraordinary experiences our current knowledge cannot understand – when you experience awe, you are left feeling blown away. The more you are able to feel awe, the happier you’ll be, he said.

Keltner also touched on “moral beauty,” the most common source of awe, and how it can serve as an alternative to the outrage served up by social media. How fitting.

“Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty: exceptional virtue, character, and ability, marked by a purity and goodness of intention and action,” Keltner wrote in a January 2023 piece in Greater Good Magazine. Witnessing other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming, the actions of strangers, roommates, teachers, colleagues, people in the news, characters on podcasts, and our neighbors and family members, most commonly led people to feel awe.

I connected to this thought, as well as the idea of “collective effervescence,” the group mind we feel when we share an experience together (of music or movement or cheering or protest). I also related to the idea of awakening to awe in the everyday – the significance of insignificant things.

I thought about what brings me awe lately: the tentacle-like tendrils my snap peas use to climb the trellis in my garden; the view from the Kings Park bluff, which never gets old no matter how many times I visit; a fellow mom I observed at a Fourth of July gathering, crouched down and joyfully tending to her kids in the midst of a passing rainstorm. It made me wonder where other people find their awe, the contributors to their happiness.

Below four Northport/East Northport community members answer the question: “What has left you feeling awe lately?” I chose people passionate about their fields: nature, music, art, and poetry, but their answers reflect many things, including being part of a group, awakening to the everyday, and simply being open to the extraordinary, even in the ordinary.

Margo Myles, Former senior environmental analyst, Town of Huntington, decades-long employee of the Department of Planning and Environment, East Northport resident
I can and do find awe everywhere. I just have to step outside and something will catch my interest. It’s about being open to learn and experience – every day brings something new. I would be hard-pressed to say one place is more awe-inspiring than another. Different places offer their own opportunities. It’s all in what you see and take away. My slow walks in the yard with my dog are awe inspiring, discovering as we go. On a [winter] day, it might just be the sun-glistened snow crystals and the little animal tracks that disappear under the snow cover. There are so many wonderful parks throughout Huntington. The important thing is to go out and find something and appreciate it.

Michael Susinno, Northport High School orchestra director/teacher
Music certainly is a powerful force and can be a wonderful vehicle of joy as well. Suite No. 2 from Daphnis and Chloe by Maurice Ravel is a piece that has always captured my imagination. Originally written as a ballet score, this music stands alone and portrays the joyful magic of a sunrise. From the moment it begins, my mind takes me on a vivid adventure. As the energy and excitement build, my heart has even started to pound. I've been fortunate to have performed this music once and I hope to have the opportunity to perform it again. I could listen to it all day, every day.

Katheryn Laible, Artist, managing partner at The Firefly Artists in Northport Village, founder of the Synchronicity Network Newsletter
I think if you asked fifteen Fireflies, you’d get fifteen different answers. If you asked one Firefly fifteen times you might also get such a variety. For me, one thing that's been bringing me joy lately is Jan Tozzo’s glass bugs. They're just adorable and she keeps slipping new ones in that surprise me.

Mostly though, it’s the whole place and the creative-loving energy our Fireflies fill it with. Every once in a while, someone walks in and you get the idea they’re just stunned for a moment. You hear them take a deep breath, release like they're letting go of something heavy, and then move toward whatever moves them. It's awesome.

Jesse Curran, PhD, Writer, scholar, teacher, mother and Northport Village resident. Her poems and essays have been published in dozens of literary journals. She is a lecturer in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury.
As a poet and scholar/teacher of poetry, I am enormously grateful that I am able to spend my days with the wonder that poetry is. After many years of study, I still find poetry to be mysterious and it continues to surprise me in sometimes startling and awe-inspiring ways. Ultimately, I believe poetry is a vehicle of opening. Perhaps that's why Orr’s poem is so resonant for me – playing on the word wound and its etymological roots connected to wonder, Orr recognizes how good poems open space without our hearts and minds to allow the immensity of the world to flow through us. Poetic language often plays within the paradoxical dance between inner and outer experience – between the unsayable and what can be said – between the material and the metaphysical. Framed as a question that reminds us of the experience of connecting with a good poem. Orr’s four lines startle my spirit awake:

Poem that opened you –
The opposite of a wound.

Didn't the world
Come pouring through?

-Gregory Orr, from How Beautiful the Beloved

Thank you to Margo, Michael, Katheryn and Jesse for sharing what excites and awakens them. Wishing you all moments of awe from today on...

Check out the Town of Huntington’s trails guide here.
Experience the London Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Daphnis and Chloe, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, here.
Be part of something special: see what’s happening at The Firefly Artists here (and marvel over Jan Tozzo’s glass bugs on her Instagram page).
Learn more about Gregory Orr and his book, How Beautiful the Beloved, here.