A note on this series: This is a five-article exploration of birds, attention, awe, and the RV lifestyle.
Notice → Understand → Experience → Awe → Meaning
Each article stands on its own but together they form a progression—from learning to pay attention to discovering why awe matters and how the RV lifestyle gives us opportunities to experience it.
Awe is not a new idea. Long before scientists began studying it, philosophers and writers were trying to understand what happens when we encounter something larger than ourselves.
Perhaps awe is also one of the things that makes a life fully lived. It interrupts the ordinary, pulls us out of ourselves, and reminds us that there is more to the world than what occupies our immediate attention.
I’ve written about mindfulness, slow travel, and learning to speak bird without realizing they share a common thread.
Pay attention.
Perhaps that is where awe begins.
Wonder begins the search
The ancient Greeks had a word for it: thauma
Long before awe became a subject for modern psychology, the ancient Greeks were fascinated by wonder—thauma—the experience of encountering something remarkable, mysterious, or difficult to explain.
For them, wonder wasn’t simply a feeling. It could be the beginning of inquiry.
In Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates describe wonder as the beginning of philosophy. Aristotle made a similar observation in Metaphysics, suggesting that philosophy began with our wondering about the world around us—the moon, the sun, the stars, and ultimately existence itself.
We tend to think of awe as something that stops us in our tracks. But perhaps stopping is only the beginning.
Wonder makes us look again.
A bird can be just a bird. Or we can stop and wonder where it came from, what it sees, what it hears, and what it is saying.
The bird hasn’t changed.
Our attention has.
And perhaps that is the first clue to the power of awe.
Looking beyond ourselves
The Stoics and the larger world
The Stoics took wonder in another direction. They looked at nature as an ordered whole and encouraged us to step outside our narrow concerns and consider our place within it.
Marcus Aurelius often contemplated the stars, the seasons, and the vastness of nature—not simply as things to admire but as reminders that our individual troubles occupy a very small place in a much larger world.
There is something remarkably familiar in that.
Awe can change the scale at which we see our lives. A problem that fills our attention can seem different beneath a night sky, watching a storm cross the desert, or listening to birdsong.
The problem hasn’t necessarily disappeared.
But we’re no longer looking at it from the same place.
Perhaps that is another power of awe: it reminds us that we are part of something larger than ourselves.
When the world becomes sublime
Burke, Kant, and the experience of vastness
More than two thousand years after the Greeks wrote about wonder, Edmund Burke gave the experience a new language: the sublime.
In 1757, Burke wrote about things vast, powerful, dark, or overwhelming. The sublime could produce such astonishment that ordinary thought seemed to fall away.
Immanuel Kant later took the idea further. For him, the sublime arose when we encountered something so immense that our ability to comprehend it seemed inadequate.
A mountain. A storm. The ocean. A star-filled sky.
The important thing wasn’t simply the thing itself but what happened within us when we encountered it.
Sometimes we meet something that doesn’t fit neatly into our understanding. We have to stop, take it in, and make room for something larger.
Perhaps that is why awe can feel so powerful.
For a moment, the world exceeds us.
Nature as a doorway
Emerson and the receptive mind
By the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson was looking at nature differently. In Nature, published in 1836, he suggested that the natural world could change us when we were truly open to it.
Nature wasn’t simply scenery. It was an experience.
Look at the stars, Emerson suggested, and ordinary concerns can fall away. Enter the woods with an open mind, and the familiar can become new again.
The stars haven’t changed. The woods haven’t changed.
We have changed the way we see them.
Emerson understood something that will become important throughout this series: we don’t always need to travel farther or find something extraordinary. Sometimes we simply need to be present enough to notice what is already there.
Perhaps the experience isn’t about finding a more extraordinary world.
Perhaps it’s about becoming more receptive to the one we already inhabit.
From wonder to science
The question changes
For thousands of years, people could describe awe, wonder, and the sublime. They could tell us what it felt like to encounter something larger than themselves. What they couldn’t do was ask, scientifically, what was happening to them.
That began to change in recent decades.
In 2003, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt proposed a framework for studying awe, identifying two essential features: vastness and a need for accommodation—the feeling that what we’re experiencing is so expansive that our existing understanding has to stretch to take it in.
It was an important shift.
Awe was no longer simply something philosophers described.
It had become something scientists could investigate.
And that raises a fascinating question: If humans have experienced awe for thousands of years, what is modern science beginning to discover about what it actually does to us?
The question becomes personal
Perhaps I have been experiencing awe all along
That question brings me back to my own experience.
For years I’ve written about mindfulness without thinking of it as a way of finding awe. I’ve written about slow travel without thinking of it as creating the conditions for awe. I’ve written about learning to speak bird without realizing that birds were teaching me the same lesson.
Pay attention.
Perhaps that is where awe begins.
A bird outside the RV window. A landscape that makes me stop. The quiet of a desert morning. An old building that suddenly makes history feel present.
None required finding something extraordinary.
They required me to notice.
Perhaps that is why this ancient experience remains so relevant. The world hasn’t become less capable of inspiring awe.
We’ve simply become very good at looking past it.
Where awe leads
From understanding to experiencing
The more I looked into awe, the more I realized I hadn’t discovered a new subject. I had discovered a thread running through much of what I’ve written about for years.
Birds taught me to pay attention.
Slow travel taught me to linger.
RVing gave me the time and freedom to do both.
Perhaps these aren’t separate interests after all. Perhaps they are different ways of experiencing the same thing.
Awe.
In the articles that follow, I want to explore that connection—not as a theory but through the experiences that have taught me something about paying attention.
And I’ll begin with the creatures that may be our best teachers.
Continue the series
Next → The Power of Awe: What Science Is Discovering
What science is beginning to reveal about this ancient human experience.
Enjoyed this article?
Share it with friends, fellow RVers, or your social network to inspire their next adventure.
Editor’s note
This article was originally published in September 2026. Information reflects what was accurate at the time of writing. Conditions, access, and amenities may change over time, so please verify current details before planning your trip.
To maintain transparency and editorial independence, this website contains no ads, no sponsored content, and no affiliate links—just firsthand RV travel experiences and practical information for fellow travelers.
Enjoyed this article?
Share it with friends, fellow RVers, or your social network to inspire their next adventure.
Editor’s note
This article was originally published in September 2026. Information reflects what was accurate at the time of writing. Conditions, access, and amenities may change over time, so please verify current details before planning your trip.
To maintain transparency and editorial independence, this website contains no ads, no sponsored content, and no affiliate links—just firsthand RV travel experiences and practical information for fellow travelers.