The Natural Cure for Burnout Is Profound and Utter Awe
Awe deprivation is common, but it doesn’t need to be
Astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell, who piloted Apollo 14 and was the sixth American to walk on the moon, once described his 1971 lunar landing mission as an “ecstasy of unity.” The experience, he said, offered “an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness.”
It’s a feeling that links him to a tiny fraction of human beings — but within this small community, it’s widespread. Many other astronauts have recalled similarly overwhelming sensations of awe seeing Earth from space. Ron Garan, who has traveled over 71,000,000 miles and orbited the Earth over 2,800 times, calls this “orbital perspective.” He says access to such a profound point of view helped him to focus on the things that really mattered in his daily, earthly life. This cognitive shift reported by astronauts is so common that the scientific community even has a name for it: The Overview Effect.
Most of us probably won’t travel to outer space, at least not anytime soon. But as this week marks the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing, it’s worth asking if the more ordinary, if still transcendent, awe we have all experienced could hold the cure for much of what ails us down on Earth.
