Awe

"This is an amazing book that sketches out some alternatives to the very shallow and impractical positive-thinking approach to happiness. Paul Pearsall was a maverick psychologist who lived in Hawaii. He died a few years ago. His book takes as its organising idea the notion that true happiness requires plenty of the emotion that he calls awe. He writes: “The best description I’ve been able to give it so far is that – no matter how good or bad our brain considers whatever is happening to be – it is feeling more totally and completely alive than we thought possible before we were in awe.” It’s an emotion that combines negativity and positivity, and that even has an element of fear in it, of not being completely in control of a situation. Yes – he has an extraordinary and awful personal story. He begins the book by talking about the difficulties he experienced around the birth of his son, and how those terrifying moments were filled with awe. Then there is a terrible postscript where he describes discovering the body of his adult son, who committed suicide. It is extremely painful, of course, and he makes you feel some of that pain. But he also adds, in a jarring phrase, that he feels more completely alive than he has done at any point he can remember before. So even at that point there is the emotion of awe. His capacity to feel what happened so intensely is still somehow preferable to the alternative. A lot of positive thinking is about shutting off those possibilities, controlling how things are going to go, and trying to know how you’re going to feel about them. Yes. He uses the word “openture”, as in the opposite to closure. It’s an awkward word, but maybe the awkwardness is part of the point. It’s the idea that we need to let go of approaches to happiness that involve trying to get the last word on life, to seal everything off neatly. Pearsall argues that openture is preferable on every level. Because in reality, we just wouldn’t want the life that is promised by purely positive thinking. It would shut off much of what it means to be alive."