Phosphorescence: On awe, wonder and things that sustain you when the world goes dark

A sense of community can also make us more resilient, not only improving our current state of mind but also protecting our mental health in the future.

a theory put forward by co-author Michael Tipton: ‘If you adapt to cold water, you also blunt your stress response to other daily stresses such as road rage, exams or getting fired at work.’

We more readily commiserate with the times when life is like a boa constrictor wrapped around our windpipes, squeezing out breath; like a dark ogre stealing our joy, our purpose and our hope as we sleep; or sometimes just like a thick black airless cave with no apparent exit.

While so much of our self-exploration today is hash-tagged #wellness and displayed, it became obvious to me in the far reach of sacred lands, encircled by campfires and eucalypts, that sometimes the best way to pay attention to country is to keep your mouth shut, open your eyes and just listen.

we should force ourselves out of gyms and off machines and into the natural world, knowing, or hoping, that we may stumble upon awe.

What can be done to nurture our inner lights, and guard them as jealously as an Olympian does a burning torch?

‘awe produces a vanishing self. The voice in your head, self-interest, self-consciousness, disappears. Here’s an emotion that knocks out a really important part of our identity . . . I think the central idea of awe is to quiet self-interest for a moment and to fold us into the social collective.’

Attempting to provide an academic definition of awe, social psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathain Haidt wrote: ‘Two appraisals are central and are present in all clear cases of awe: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, defined as an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures.’

Something happens when you dive into a world where clocks don’t tick and inboxes don’t ping. As your arms circle, swing and pull along the edge of a vast ocean, your mind wanders, and you open yourself to awe, to the experience of seeing something astonishing, unfathomable or greater than yourself. Studies have shown that awe can make us more patie