When I first heard about "illiberal democracy," and what Victor Orban was doing in Hungary, I didn't give it much thought. Then when Marine Le Pen became a rising star in France, and a Nazi-tinged party started winning big in Germany, I just shook my head and hoped this far right trend would pass.

But instead, the dissolution of the liberal world order quickened: Narendra Modi transformed India into a Hindu dictatorship... Jair Bolsonaro pulled off a coup in Brazil... Javier Milei feverishly waved a chain saw around Argentina... and then, fuck it, unbelievable, Putin's tanks rolled into Ukraine... Bibi Netanyahu ripped apart the bodies of 20,000 children... and finally, the coup de grâce: Trump's landslide victory last November.

Scientists used to think there were only six human emotions — anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear and sadness. We now know there is a seventh: awe.

Awe is the feeling, registering more in our body than our mind, that we’re in the presence of something so vast and deep and powerful that it swamps our present understanding of the world. A skyful of stars in the middle of nowhere. A soaring piece of art. An act of wild kindness, fugitively glimpsed.

Or an existential threat.

Awe is unlike anything else we humans experience. When it shoots through us, we enter a kind of altered state. We become superhuman, sleeper agents suddenly activated for a purpose we never prepared for, and barely understand.

Awe interrupts the trance, silences the static and replaces it with the clarity of mind to understand what our job is now.

The craving to be part of a bigger project, this is the “collective effervescence” Emile Durkheim spoke of: an energy and harmony that only happens when we huddle up on strong groups for a shared purpose.

People suddenly understand where they fit in the story of the world, now and going forward.

From the moment you start dreaming as a teenager, start delving into philosophy and following artists, sense a first hint of awe at your existence and wonder if life has any meaning at all.

Riddles wrapped in enigmas wrapped in mysteries. What the hell happened before the Big Bang? Does AI totally vanquish the idea of a human soul? And who is this "I" asking all these things, anyway?

You'll keep asking questions like that ... again and again and again.

In my late teens I thought I'd found some answers in Wittgenstein . . . and then in Sartre & Heidegger . . . and later in Shinto's mystical embrace of nature . . . and in the films of Ozu and the nothingness of Zen. The artist Agnes Martin once hit me hard with: "I am staying unsettled and trying not to talk for three years. I want to do it very much."

In high school the cool kids smoked. So I started smoking too. And I continued to smoke in university. I just changed brands. Gaulois were too pretentious; I went for British brands like Peter Stuyvesant, with its pure white pack.

Then I started to hear murmurings: cigarettes cause lung cancer.

It was still just a rumor — at least that’s how the industry spun it. “The link hasn’t been proven,” said Philip Morris. PM had marshaled a team of corporate lawyers and PR flacks — not to mention publicly skeptical doctors on their payroll. The evidence just isn’t there, they said. The average smoker’s chances of getting lung cancer from cigarettes is roughly the chance of being struck by lightning.

So I kept puffing.

But I tried to quit, again and again. Problem was, I couldn’t edit a film without smoking. You can imagine it: you’re immersed in the flow, the rational part of your brain is in park, the wild reactive part firing on instinct, and your hand instinctively reaches for a dart. For me back then smoking was woven into the ritual of doing creative work on a deadline.

Just west of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan stands the Crooked Grove, a stand of aspen trees that, for reasons scientists don't fully understand, all grow gnarled and deformed.

The trees start out straight but then bend, eventually curling so far out of the sunlight that they begin to die. At which point new shoots spring out from the trunk and start growing in a different direction.

The new generation wants to live, despite its parents' crooked ways.

—Harry Flood