I walked about 75 yards from the visitor center, stepped to the railing, looked both ways and gawked.
I’m not a big gawker. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I gawked. But the Grand Canyon will do that to you. It isn’t something you merely see. It’s something you behold.
It is truly awesome.
Which got me thinking about the word awesome. It may be the most abused word in the English language. It applies to the Grand Canyon, the Golden Gate Bridge and even a rocket launch. It does not apply to a waitress who got your order right at Cracker Barrel. That isn’t awesome. That’s just being competent.
Later that day, I climbed into my rental car, started the engine and programmed Google Maps to take me back to Phoenix. As I pulled onto the highway, I began to wonder what else in our lives deserves the kind of awe we reserve for natural wonders, tall buildings and apparently a waitress who gets your order correct.
We live in an age of awesomeness, and we barely notice it.
In our pockets is a slab of glass that can summon the world’s knowledge, a computer more powerful than the ones that sent astronauts to the moon. That is awesome, even if many of us mainly use it to watch dog videos, stalk old classmates and argue with strangers we will never meet.
Consider the automobile. Engineers correctly call it “an accumulation of genius,” and they’re right. A modern car contains roughly 30,000 parts. From the wheels to the GPS, it’s a rolling museum of human invention. That is awesome, even if my truck costs more than my first house, and comes with fewer bedrooms.
And it’s not just the parts. It’s the idea that thousands of minds across centuries contributed so that I can push a button and drive to the grocery store without having to hitch up a horse. When you really think about it, the miracle isn’t that cars are expensive, it’s that they work at all.
And the airplane: wow! A metal tube full of people hurtling through the sky at near-supersonic speeds. A fully loaded 737 weighs around 80 tons. And it flies! The wings flex, engines roar; physics performs miracles while we sit there watching movies and complaining about legroom. Jet planes enable us to have breakfast in New York and dinner in Los Angeles. That is awesome. Now, if they could just stop sending my luggage to Minneapolis when I’m in Nashville, we’d be approaching divine intervention.
Medicine should leave us in awe, too. Artificial joints. Robotic surgery. Procedures that were science fiction a generation ago are now routine. People walk again. Hearts are repaired. Lives are extended. Yet, we’re more impressed by whether the hospital has free Wi-Fi and a Starbucks inside.
So, what happened to our sense of wonder?
Our brains are wired to get used to extraordinary things. The first time I used ChatGPT, I thought it was magic created by some techno-wizard in a dark room. A few weeks later, it became just another tool I use to edit – mostly to check commas and make me feel inadequate about my grammar. It’s no less amazing. I’ve just grown accustomed to it. Like indoor plumbing.
In the past, awe was easy to spot. You could stand on the Golden Gate Bridge or watch an Apollo rocket launch and see and feel the power of human ingenuity. Today, many of our greatest breakthroughs, like microchips, invisible networks, and the internet itself, are too small to see and too complex to explain. What I’m saying is that size really does matter.
We’re bombarded with “the next big thing” every day: new phones, new updates, new breakthroughs. My phone updates so often I’m starting to suspect it just does it to make me mad. I have an app that lets me start my truck from anywhere in the world. While I don’t plan on cranking up my Chevy from Indonesia, I’m still awed by the fact that I could. But when breakthroughs happen at a breakneck pace, we don’t have time to marvel at any single one. We’re already chasing the next thing before we’ve fully processed the current one.
Maybe that’s the problem. When everything is extraordinary, nothing feels extraordinary for very long.
Maybe we should slow down.
To be in awe is to recognize the bridge between human imagination and reality. It’s noticing the miracles hidden inside ordinary days. It’s realizing that most of what surrounds us would have looked like sorcery to our grandparents, and witchcraft to their grandparents.
So do yourself a favor. Be in awe. Stop every now and then and just say, “Wow.”
Look at a bridge. Watch an airplane take off. Think about what it took to make your phone, your car, your medicine, your world. Choose to see the magic that others have grown blind to.
And if you do, that would be awesome.
(See how silly that sounds now?)
Joe Hobby is a barbecue-loving comedian from Alabama who wrote for Jay Leno for many years. Find more of Joe’s stories on his blog: www.mylifeasahobby.blogspot.com. Follow him on Facebook at Joe Hobby Comedian-Writer.
