I think a lot about the contrast between banality and wonder,
between disengagement and radiant ecstasy,
between being unaffected by the here and now
and being absolutely ravished emotionally by it.
And I think one of the problems for human beings
is mental habits.
Once we create a comfort zone, we rarely
step outside of that comfort zone.
But the consequence of that is a phenomenon
known as hedonic adaptation.
Over stimulation to the same kind of thing,
the same stimuli again and again and again,
renders said stimuli invisible.
Your brain has already mapped it in its own head,
and you no longer literally have to be engaged by that.
We have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not,
and hearts that neither feel nor understand.
There's a great book called The Wondering Brain that
says that one of the ways that we elicit wonder
is by scrambling the self temporarily
so that the world can seep in.
Henry Miller says even a blade of grass,
when given proper attention, becomes
an infinitely magnificent world in itself.
Darwin said attention, if sudden and close, graduates
in surprise, and this into astonishment,
and this into stupefied amazement.
That's what rapture is.
That's what illumination is.
That's what that sort of infinite comprehending
awe that human beings love so much.
And so how do we do that?
How do we mess with our perceptual apparatus
in order to have the kind of emotional and aesthetic
experience from life that we render most meaningful?
Because we all know those moments are there.
Those are the moments that would make final cut.
Only in these moments we experience a fresh,
the hardly bearable ecstasy of different energy
exploding on our nerve endings.
This is the rhapsodic, ecstatic, bursting forth
of awe that expands our perceptual parameters
beyond all previous limits.
And we literally have to reconfigure our mental models
of the world in order to assimilate
the beauty of that download.
That is what it means to be inspired.
The Greek root of the term means to breathe in, to take it in.
We fit the universe through our brains,
and it comes out in the form of nothing less than poetry.
We have a responsibility to awe.