(Earthrise from Apollo 11)

It’s hard to put your finger on when we began to lose touch with our ancient companions, awe and dread.  Those two emotions that have inspired us and motivated us, and that in many ways have defined our humanity… are slipping away.

Awe has been with us since our first footprints.  The animals didn’t feel wonder at a canyon, or a thunderstorm, or a tree.  They didn’t ponder the magnificence of great beasts that could end us, or nourish and sustain us.  They didn’t scratch their respect in the dirt, or with paint on walls, or canvas.  Awe was with people as we built and beheld Stonehenge and the great cathedrals, as we set sail before the wind, and even as we watched our brothers set our footprints on the dusty world above.  Awe moved us to subscribe to gods.

Something is changing, and it’s accelerating.  Maybe it started when we migrated to cities.  Our environs became less awesome, and more commonplace.  Our needs were satiated by process, not by trial.  Buying meat in a market is a less powerful experience than killing it.

It’s also harder to feel awe when the world comes to you through wires.  First radio, then television, then computers and an array of gizmos, have served us well.  But they also gave us a sense of mastery.  We now feel like the masters, the creators, the awesome ones.

Something similar has happened with the dread our ancestors knew – and learned, and relearned and learned again.  Not only do some of us not flee before a hurricane, we expect, not completely unreasonably, that our governments will protect us from the worst.  That’s not dread.  Earlier generations and centuries were intimate with war.  It didn’t stop the madness, but it did insist that we look ahead with profound fear to what would happen.  How can we feel the same dread when the dirty business is far away, pixels and bytes, and touches most of us only indirectly?  War doesn’t stop the shopping anymore, doesn’t ration our meals, and we can’t smell the offal and the burning.

We don’t even dread the end, in all its malevolent forms, as we once did.  Disease and injury are things to be conquered by the masters of medicine and longevity, pushing back the darkness with growing genius and industriousness.

We have downsized dread to how we feel about the commute home tonight in traffic, to “surviving” a business meeting or holiday dinner with contentious relatives and guests.

Modern life has insulated us and alienated us from these concepts of dread and awe.  I’m not sure how to feel about that, or whether it’s good or bad, or neither.  But I do know this:  Dread will come to call on all of us, sometimes, and for certain.  We can delay, defer and deny it most of the time, but not always or forever.  And awe is something precious, to be sought and hunted, and felt with our ancient senses.  We can feel it in considering the Mars lander that discovered water ice on a distant world.  We can feel it in the forest, or below the ocean.  We can feel it for the things we’ve made or that we’ve inherited.  And it can make us feel pride and humility at once.  Awesome.

(green frog - I like frogs) 

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 Cam Battley lives quietly in rural Ontario, Canada.