Issue #196: When Is the Last Time You Truly Felt in Awe?

Maintaining a connection to life, even with all the to-dos.

📺 “Sirens” on Netflix: This five-part mini-series should appeal to “White Lotus” fans as another deep dive into the lives of the super-elite, with a killer cast. In it, a billionaire’s (Julianne Moore) uncomfortably close, culty relationship with her assistant Simone (Milly Alcock) unravels when Simone receives a surprise visit from her sister (Meghann Fahy).

📚 Euphoria by Lily King: I can’t remember the last time a book has made me cry at the end, but as soon as I finished this novel (which came out 10 years ago, so excuse my delay in finally reading it!) inspired by cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, I held it to my chest, actually ugly crying. The slim novel follows three anthropologists caught in a love triangle in the 1930s, living with tribes in the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea. It’s also about how humans are misunderstood, and how communication and rituals can both bond and isolate us. A gorgeous book with a final line that wrecked me (don’t skip ahead!). And here are a few books that made you cry at the end—feel free to add to the list!

🎥 ‘Companion’ on Max: I was not prepared to love this movie as much as I did, given the trailer, but friends of mine felt so passionately about it that they hosted a movie night in their backyard to screen it. It’s a psychological thriller (there’s gore, but no jump scares!) that falls in the same vein as ‘Ex Machina,’ ‘Her,’ or even my novel, with a girlfriend bot who becomes aware of her own status as a robot. The movie is surprisingly funny, but also stirs up deeper questions around ethics and how we relate to each other. If you watched and loved it, try this recent Dutch short film, ‘I’m Not a Robot.’

“Normally, at this point, I would be asking, ‘When was the last time you had sex?’ But in your case, I’ll ask, ‘When was the last time you experienced awe together?’”

My boyfriend and I sat on a couch across from our couples’ therapist, who waited expectantly for our response. We each held a list of three things we would like more of in our relationship. In reading them out loud, we discovered that they were nearly identical. Below “Better communication,” we had both written, “More awe.”

I looked at my boyfriend and asked, “A few weeks?” before turning back towards our therapist to confirm. For most of my life, my experience and understanding of awe was relegated to singular, extraordinary moments—a sharp inhale of breath that softened into wonder as I stood at the rim of the Grand Canyon or held my best friend’s newborn hours after she was born. It wasn’t until I began to research awe for an ecotherapy project, and fall in love with the classmate I was working on it with, that I began to see the world is suffused with awe, so long as we create space for it.

On our first date, my classmate (now boyfriend) and I hiked to a ridge overlooking a field of wildflowers. As soon as we reached the top, the skies opened up with rain, but we stayed for an hour, getting soaked to our bones, too amazed by the natural beauty, and the easy intimacy already between us, to want to leave. Many of our early conversations revolved around whether this way of relating to each other, and to the world, was something we could sustain. We were both wary of putting our weight on something so ephemeral, me from my divorce and he from his recovery, but we came to discover that awe could actually be grounding.

As we all know, life gets busy. Weeks can go by when, say, one of you is crushed by the demands of her final semester of graduate school and the other is working late to build his private practice. It’s easy to lose sight of the things that truly matter in the mess of daily to-dos. When you’re years into a relationship, how do you protect that space and maintain a connection to the sacred bond that brought you together in the first place? (Especially when you’ve already lost that connection once.) How do you maintain that connection to yourself within the confines of responsibilities and mundane tasks?