Awesome

If you've ever been in an isolation prison then you might understand it when I say that seeing the stars brought me to my knees, weeping. I spent fourteen long years in that box. Dim light. Gray walls. Gray mattress. Silver toilet bowl. Three paces wide four paces long. I only found out it was so long when I was released. They never told me why I was released. They never told me why I was put in in the first place. All I knew was that being out of that box was the best feeling I had ever felt.

The prison was underground and when I reached the surface, I was in a field of moonlit grass with a field of stars overhead. My knees buckled and the tears poured out. I hadn't seen those stars in fourteen years. I stripped off my shirt and kicked off my shoes and rolled around like a dog on the grass savoring the softness and even the itchiness.

I rolled on my side and looked over to see the largest full moon I had ever seen rising above the trees. It seemed like it was coming down to meet me. The sad face of the man in the moon stared down at me.

I gazed at it in wonder for hours as it ascended into the night sky.

It was awesome.



That was totally awesome!!!! - The little boy on the trike from Incredibles

"They need a hero Bolt, someone who, no matter what the odds, will do what's right. They need a hero to tell them that sometimes the impossible can become possible if you're awesome!" - Rhino, the hamster from 'Bolt'.

The word Awesome saturates the American use of the English language. It is used for everything. "Dude that bike was awesome!", "That movie was, like, totally awesome!", "Man, you are so awesome!" We throw it around as if it were a commonplace word and not possessing any significance .

Urban dictionary defines the word awesome as this: "A 'sticking plaster' word used by Americans to cover over the huge gaps in their vocabulary. It is one the three words which make up most American sentances." http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=awesome

I have to agree with Urban Dictionary on this one. This word has been abused and misused. I wish so very much that I could decry its abuse with a clean conscience but I too am guilty of this crime. And though I know that I condemn myself, I DO indeed call it a crime. It is battery against the word and the adulteration of its meaning. Awesome is a word indicating that something (a person, thing, or event) is awe-inspiring.

Have you, my dear readers, ever felt true awe?

Maybe you have stood atop a mountain and looked out upon a grand vista, or stood among the vista and looked up at the mountain and felt the smallness of yourself and the grandeur of the mountain? Maybe you have stood in the rain of a thunderstorm with the tearing wind threatening to knock you off your feet as lighting tears a rift in a fabric of the clouds and thunder deafens your ears? Have you stood on a bluff and looked out over the ocean? Have you seen the night sky from the wilderness or the open sea and beheld the myriads of stars? Few of you may have seen the pyramids of Egypt or the great wall of china. More off you have probably seen the Sears Tower or the Grand Canyon. All of these could be described as awesome and in fact should inspire awe in us.

Do they?

Upon choosing this word to write about and thinking about it (more than I usually did), I began to wonder if there has been a shift in our mind that corresponds to our shift in vocabulary. We toss out the word very easily do we also bestow the meaning of 'awesome' as easily? If so, we are faced with one of two options. Either we are like children, who are filled with wide-eyed wonder at everything or we have wonder at nothing. I tend to think that it is the latter. With all of our technology and especially our social networking technology, we have become very people-focused (and often self-focused). We are immersed in a culture of instant gratification and pleasures being offered to us right on our doorstep. We are so easily bored. I have seen teenagers looking across a gorgeous landscape for bare moments before returning to their text messaging. Children who normally would have stared in wonder out of the windows of an airplane now are engrossed in their portable video games. I'm not speaking out against technology but I would decry the sentence "that KO in Mortal Kombat was awesome!"

If something is truly awesome, then it should be something that causes our jaws to drop, our eyes to widen, and our hearts to race. Awe is an extreme state.

So, my dear readers, I ask: How do you use the word awesome? When you do use it, do you mean it with all the awe that it implies? What do you consider to be awesome?

Think about it.