There’s a painful kind of humility in discovering you and a professional technically share a hobby.
I have felt that smallness many times– once with the guitar. I’ve played long enough to think, “okay, I sort of get this.” Then one night, at a small venue, I saw a real professional—and immediately realized I did not, in fact, get this. He was the real deal. Within ten seconds I realized: oh, we’re not even playing the same instrument. I mean, technically we are—six strings, same tuning—but the stuff coming out of his sounded like it had gone to college. The most interesting part was that I couldn’t tell how far away I was from that level. The distance between us felt enormous, but undefined, like trying to measure a fog.
There’s a feeling that comes when you watch someone do something that reaches beyond what you understand—an awareness that something larger is unfolding, though you can’t tell quite how large. All you can do is watch, from some cognitive distance, and wonder. There’s a kind of pleasant helplessness to it.
We have other words for this sensation—magic, transcendence—but awe remains my favorite, because it sounds like what it means. The mouth opens the way the mind does: wide, uncertain, a little breathless.
But awe, for all its grandeur, seems fragile. The moment you start to take it apart—to explain, analyze, reduce—it begins to dissolve. You see the structures underneath: the notes, the patterns, the mechanisms. And so the mystery shrinks to technique. The guitarist becomes a collection of habits, reflexes, and muscle memory. A bag of tricks. And so we arrive at a familiar worry for anyone who makes, studies, or dissects: by understanding too deeply, do we destroy what first drew us in?
The better you understand something, the less impressive it seems. I hate that. I really do. You start out amazed — you see someone do something incredible, and you think, “wow, that’s magic.” Then you actually learn how it works, and suddenly it’s “oh, that’s just muscle memory and timing.” You can’t help but think: “thanks for ruining it“. The guitarist, the chef, the magician—they all go from miracle workers to people with good technique. It’s easy to mistake that as loss.
But that fear gets awe wrong. The beauty doesn’t vanish when you see the scaffolding—it just changes direction. There’s beauty inwards, in the fact that these structures work at all: that strings vibrate, that wood resonates, that a thousand tiny adjustments can make harmony. And there’s beauty outwards, too—that the same mechanics can still create the distance to lead others into the same helpless wonder you once felt.
Perhaps the real illusion is that understanding ever ends. We imagine an endpoint—some final theory, a last unveiling—but every time we get close, another layer appears. Each answer deepens the mystery instead of resolving it. If that’s true, then knowledge doesn’t diminish awe; it multiplies it. Every act of learning becomes another way of touching the vastness, another door through which wonder re-enters.
The fear that knowledge will kill beauty is itself a kind of superstition. What it really does is change the location of beauty. Perhaps the guitarist’s hands no longer seem magical, but the fact that they work at all—that the human mind can translate feeling into sound—feels even more miraculous.
What’s more, awe was never a property of the world to begin with—it’s a response of the mind. We talk about it as if it lives in the music, or the stars, or the ocean, but it doesn’t. Awe is the brief moment when understanding loosens its grip and wonder slips through the opening. It’s not the world that’s vast; it’s the part of us that can still be moved by it.
And so awe is left to find a new home; it migrates, but survives.
What a gift.
