Walk the Pod: 10 minute walking
S52E9 Awe, significance, and insignificance
Walking around my local streets this lunchtime rounding up the episodes from series 52 so far, plus a voice note from Sam 💞
(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to Walk the Pod, your daily walking show where I take my podcast for a walk because I don't have a dog. You're very welcome along. This is episode nine, series 52 of the daily walking podcast that tempts you away from your desk and out into nature for just 10 minutes. We've been discussing our theme of all series this month. It's been a fascinating look at a rather difficult to pin down emotion if indeed it even is an emotion. And today we're going to be wrapping up the theme as I walk around my local streets in South West London. Welcome to Walk the Pod. (upbeat music) - Hey, Rach. Hey, Potties and apologies for the washing machine doing a spin cycle in the background. I've been out and it was too cold on my hands to get my phone out to record while I was walking. So I've come back and thought I would share my thoughts on or now before we finish the series. I've really enjoyed it so far. And I think my thoughts are nothing new. Probably just going to echo what's already been shared. But my experiences of all have pretty much been prompted or my most memorable experiences of all have been prompted by nature. Usually incredibly big things or incredibly small things when I was traveling in Asia and seeing the reclaimed temples, I say reclaimed, the nature reclaimed temples in Cambodia was incredible. When I've been lucky enough to go scuba diving in some really quite beautiful places. To see the big and small stuff there is can be quite overwhelming at times when you're underneath an enormous manta ray. That just is the bigger than a car that just gently glides over the top. Or when you've got your camera out and you're looking at these tiny little super colorful nudibranchs and cobble species that if you didn't know they were there you could just glance past and not see. But when you do see them you think how could I have possibly missed them in the first place. So I think unsurprisingly nature provides me with the most awe that I think I've sort of memorably experienced. And going back to the more convenient places, walking in nature in Richmond Park one of my most favorite places in the world. Just getting to connect with nature there. Yeah, it leaves me speechless sometimes. It's wonderful. So yes, I get filled with a very warm sense of being entirely insignificant but hugely significant all at the same time. Right, those are my thoughts. I will quit rambling now and let you guys get back to listening to Rachel. Okay, bye! Thank you, Sam, for that excellent voice note on awe and completely agree with you about Richmond Park. I haven't been to Cambodia. So I can't comment on that one and I haven't been snorkeling underneath snorkeling scuba diving underneath the gigantic manta ray. So that's not something I have any experience of but as I was listening to this voice note in the kitchen with Sam yesterday, she was saying that they blot out the sun as they go over you as your scuba diving under them. And that must be just an extraordinary experience. If you think of how many people travel to be in particular places when a solar eclipse happens because the moon is in front of the sun. Imagine a manta eclipse where big fish is in front of the sun. Oh, dear. It's a lovely to hear your beautiful voice. Thank you for recording that for everybody. We draw our theme to a close now. And so it remains for me to sum up the theme, to talk a bit about what we've discovered about awe. And as usual, I feel like we have but scratched the surface. And I have only a couple of minutes to sum up because I also want to tell you what I can see directly in front of me. But we have discussed, awe in many different ways, the awe of being next to something enormous. And as Sam mentioned there, the feeling of being utterly insignificant, in comparison to something enormous, we also talked about the overview effect, which is maybe linked where astronauts sometimes have their whole way of being alive changed by the experience of seeing the earth from the outside. But we can also feel a sense of awe in people, whether they be people who inspire power, wonder, maybe even fear in us, or alternatively, maybe they're people who are doing something utterly selfless for others every day. These can inspire feelings of awe in everyone. And we've also touched on where exactly awe sits in the emotional spectrum. It is quite difficult to pin it down. It is perhaps somewhere in the same area as surprise, but it's not quite as transient as that. It can be a very long-lasting feeling. Is it an emotion? Is it a mood? I think as with many emotions it has, whilst the joy, whilst there is joy in it, there is also a sense of a more negative feeling of vulnerability, because sometimes when we're perceiving something awesome, we're also aware of how utterly vulnerable to that thing we are. Like, for example, an awesome sight of a woolly mammoth. For a cave person must have been equally terrifying, as it was impressive, due to the fact that the woolly mammoth could stampy you quite easily and travel you to death. And I feel like I'm sort of hopping from thing to thing here, but one other thing around people is perhaps we also feel awe when we are in the presence of somebody who's very, very knowledgeable about something, somebody who gives us a glimpse of their expertise and we feel awestruck by what that must mean that they know in total. And we all have the same, more or less the same, brain size. So, yeah, how is it that certain people just have, what seems like, reams of inside capidias with of knowledge in there? And others not so much. So from a bare, very little brain, thank you for very much, indeed, for walking with me during this fascinating theme exploration. I have thoroughly enjoyed it, and I hope you have too. What can I see directly in front of me? Well, it's a beautiful day, actually. It started off freezing. There was thick ice on the cars here in southwest London. We travelled on the school run with ice everywhere. But as the day has worn on, I now see this quite incredible sight of what looks like steam or smoke coming off the fences as the sun hits the frost. And I see the frost dissolving in front of my very eyes and evaporating into the air. It's pretty incredible, honestly. Thank you so much for walking with me, dear friends. It's been a delight to stretch my legs with you this lunchtime. Tomorrow, I will be spending the episode thanking the members of the Walk the Pod Lunchtime Walk Club. So if you would like to be one of them, you've got 24 hours to join. Go to walkthepod.com, press the button mark, join the Walk the Pod Lunchtime Walk Club, and you'll get access to the Discord server. A chance to chat with walkers all over the world over the winter break when we don't have an episode. A series, sorry. And access to the community behind the scenes of Walk the Pod, including my Friday photo dumps. Various essays about how to be a person in the world. And hope and inspiration throughout all of that. I hope that's what I want to bring to the world anyway. That's my aspiration. Thank you for walking with me. Take care of your beautiful mind, yourselves and each other. And I'll be back with our final episode of Series 52 tomorrow. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)