I don’t want to go 80 m.p.h. wearing a seatbelt in a car, much less clipped to skis wearing only outerwear, but that’s a mortal talking, a mortal who is grateful for every minute of the Olympics so far.
The chutzpah of 41-year-old-Lindsey Vonn, attempting the downhill event on a torn A.C.L. The gritty, composed, prepared-for-her-moment downhill skier Breezy Johnson, who took the gold. The simultaneous precision and abandon of Japan’s figure skater Yuma Kagiyama, who led his team to silver. And then there’s his main competition from the United States, Ilia Malinin.
Malinin soared at his Olympic debut this weekend and then came back down to earth to land five quad jumps in the free program, helping to deliver gold for the American team. He has also thrown in back flips just in case you thought none of this was for fun. After crushing the individual short program on Tuesday, he’ll move on to the free skate where, fingers crossed, he will give us something the Olympics have never seen, the quadruple axel, four-and-a-half rotations that would cement his standing as Quad God.
Speaking of power, the Italian speedskater Francesca Lollobrigida made me jump to my feet, alone in my living room, not just because of her rhythmic record-setting breakaway (on her 35th birthday, no less) but also the gonzo reaction of her husband and 2-year-old watching her cross the finish line.
So let me say here, thanks for a much needed injection of awe, Breezy, Francesca, Yuma and Ilia. It was a welcome breather from a barrage of disturbing news.
I don’t know how everyone else’s nervous system is doing but I’ve been struggling, watching and waiting for the next bad thing to happen — to our kids or parents, our towns, country or planet. As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett told me, “Vigilance is metabolically expensive.” It cripples our stamina.
Despite the familiar and understandable desire to tune out (I watch, read and listen to half as much commentary as I used to), staying informed is Step 1 of citizenship. How to counterbalance the drain of frantically tracking each new outrage (which in itself won’t get us very far) and replenish our energies for the work ahead? Seek out moments of wonder.
Enter the Winter Olympics.
For the next week and a half, the Games will continue to offer all of us short, restorative respites from the ever-harder work of participatory democracy. Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has spent decades studying what happens to us when we experience awe. It isn’t just a pleasant feeling. His research suggests that awe allows for a neurobiological reset in which hormones are released that lower pro-inflammatory cytokines — metabolically expensive molecules linked to stress, depression and chronic disease.
It’s not that I didn’t feel stressed as I watched Vonn shooting out of the gate and then disappear in a cloud of snow when she crashed. But there’s a difference watching cruelty, corruption or violence and leaning into the TV watching someone risk it all for greatness.
The key to getting the full set of physiological benefits is beholding, a practice that will pay off over the course of watching these Games and long after. Beholding takes close attention and the full power of your senses.
If you missed the Games this weekend, let your mouth hang open at the moxie of the snowboarder Chloe Kim, who will be competing in the halfpipe event starting Wednesday despite having torn her labrum in January.
Let yourself be mesmerized by the way she floats off the side of the halfpipe and into her rotations. Notice the height she gets and her strangely soft landings. Take in the sounds of ice under her board as she rolls from one wall to the other like a happy marble.
Beholding takes — and causes — a smallness of self. Make yourself an agendaless intake machine and be cured, for a moment, of the nagging self-interested ego. For an extra dose of wonder, activate your imagination, that most singular human trait.
Imagine Chloe Kim at 3, at 9, wondering if she could follow one 1080 (three full revolutions in the air) with a second one. Imagine any fall, any dream of any podium she might have had. Imagine blisters, squat cycles, M.R.I.s, recovery ice baths. Beholding returns all effort.
There is a lot of wonder to be had in the dedication that precedes the Games. Devotion, the opposite of smash and grab, is slow and full of faith.
Any one of the Olympic performances will be enough to flood your system with dopamine, which creates that sense of wanting to look more, and endorphins (the brain’s natural opioids), which contribute to what researchers call aesthetic chills defined as, and I am not making this up, skin orgasms (and who doesn’t want more of those?).
If you miss Kim, try to catch her American teammate Mystique Ro, who worked odd jobs to pay for training expenses, sledding head first, chin inches from the ice, at over 80 m.p.h. around the skeleton course on Friday. Or see any of the women in the paradoxical biathlon sprint on Saturday, in which champions will need both elite cardiovascular fitness and calm as heart rates spike to 180 b.p.m. and then must immediately be brought under control to shoot at a target 50 meters away.
As you sink into the events, mono-focus. Welcome awe into your frayed being. And don’t miss the Alps. Nature has never looked better than set against the aesthetic poverty of our digital spaces.
When you return, or are dragged back, to the uglier ways of the world, notice a reorientation on collective well-being over individual gain. Keltner’s research shows that frequently, the experience of awe is related to generosity, an inclination to help others and prosocial feelings of trust and connection. This isn’t wishful thinking; it’s measurable behavioral change.
So between calling Congress, supporting nonprofits, making signs for the next protest, registering to vote, attending town halls and adding your name to petitions, be reinforced by other forms of devotion and the proof that although greed, corruption and violence are on full display these days, so too are single-mindedness, solidarity and resolve.
Kelly Corrigan is the host of the podcast “Kelly Corrigan Wonders.”
Photographs by Enea Lebrun/Reuters, Charlie Riedel/Associated Press, Gregory Bull/Associated Press, Kemal Aslan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, Francisco Seco/Associated Press, Ann Wang/Reuters, Meridith Kohut for The New York Times, Albert Gea/Reuters, and Marton Monus/Reuters.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Thanks, Olympics. We Needed This. appeared first on New York Times.
