Life begins with gratitude for the gift of life and continues with living our thanks by using our abilities. Our Gratitude is profound and therefore spiritual. Life inspires awe when we think about it or experience things like a newborn baby or a starry night or a walk in a woods, or when your grandchild sees you coming and comes running to hug you, calling Pop in a big, happy voice. My name is Denis but my real name is Pop.
This awe we feel is far more important than we thought. We cannot live without having it and sharing it, and seeing it shared by each other. The very foundation of human life is the comfort we give each other, and it starts with shared awe. We need the comfort of each other to face life and death and good and evil. We are the only species on earth than has to face them and we became able to do so only by the slow change in our psychology that comforting each other allowed.
Our need for each other means our gratitude is for life and each other and our thanks is using our abilities for ourselves and each other. This is a huge change in what we generally think about gratitude and thanksgiving, one we need to talk over. We do not realize we share awe and that doing so is the foundation of our human thriving. We confuse awe with religion, which we do not all share, but awe is deeper than religion, it is where religion comes from.
How can we start sharing awe again, and become a comfort to each other again? Begin by looking inside to find and feel your own awe. I feel mine, and I have good reasons to think that it is inside each of us, all of us, and can bring us back to each other.
I will be blogging about awe and each other for a while. I will also talk some about my recent book, The Divided States of America, Reunited. The book is about bringing us back together, starting with spirituality, adding each other, and living with personal responsibility and also for each other.