The most productive emotional state for a child isn’t comfort or safety; it’s contradiction. Psychologists who study awe have found that the experience of feeling simultaneously small and expansive, terrified and relieved, is what researchers like Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt describe as an emotion with moral, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions that reconfigures how we see ourselves in relation to everything else. When you were seven years old, lying on your back in the grass, staring up into a sky that went on forever, the fear and the peace you felt weren’t opposing signals. They were the same signal, arriving on two frequencies.

That moment shaped more than you realize.

The Contradiction That Doesn’t Need Resolving

We spend most of adulthood trying to eliminate contradictions. We want our beliefs to line up with our actions, our emotions to make sense, our internal monologue to reach a verdict. The psychologist Leon Festinger built an entire theory around this impulse. Cognitive dissonance, as he described it in 1957, is the discomfort you feel when your beliefs don’t line up with your actions, or when you hold two conflicting beliefs at once. The discomfort pushes you to resolve it: change your behavior, change your beliefs, or minimize the importance of the conflict.

Festinger’s theory assumes we want consonance. Harmony. A tidy internal state. And most of the time, he’s probably right. But the night sky doesn’t offer consonance. It offers two truths at the same time: you are vanishingly small, and you are alive enough to know it. Terror and relief. Insignificance and meaning. The child who lies in the grass and feels both of those things isn’t experiencing a problem to be solved. She’s experiencing the beginning of curiosity.

This is the distinction that matters. Not all contradictions are dysfunction. Some are doorways.

What Awe Actually Does to the Mind

Research on awe has identified two core features of the experience: perceived vastness (encountering something much larger than the self) and a need for accommodation (the existing mental frameworks can’t quite contain what you’re seeing). When a child looks at the Milky Way for the first time, she’s encountering both. The sky is vast beyond comprehension, and her seven-year-old understanding of the world has no category large enough to hold it.

The accommodation piece is where it gets interesting. Accommodation is what happens when your brain has to reorganize itself because the old structure doesn’t work anymore. The concept has roots in developmental psychology, where it describes how children rebuild part of their mental architecture when new experiences don’t fit existing frameworks.

Research suggests that awe produces what researchers call a small self effect, where people’s sense of their own importance shrinks relative to whatever has inspired the awe. Paul Piff and colleagues later connected this to prosocial behavior: people who experience awe are more generous, more cooperative, and more willing to help strangers. The small self doesn’t feel diminished in a depressive sense. It feels liberated. When you’re not the center of the story, you’re free to be curious about the rest of it.

That combination, the smallness and the freedom, is exactly what the child on the grass feels. The terror is the smallness. The relief is the freedom.

Why the Fear Matters as Much as the Wonder

We tend to romanticize the wonder half of childhood stargazing. The wide eyes. The pointing finger. The breathless questions about how far away the stars are. But the fear half is doing just as much cognitive work.

Fear in the face of vastness is an honest response. It means the child’s nervous system is registering something real: that the universe is indifferent, enormous, and not built around her. This is not a comfortable realization. Some children cry. Some go quiet. Some ask their parents if the sun will explode. The question behind the question is always the same: does my existence matter in the face of all this?

And the relief that follows, when it comes, isn’t an answer to that question. It’s something stranger. It’s the discovery that the question itself doesn’t destroy you. You can sit with not knowing. You can hold the terror and still breathe. The ground is still under you. Someone you love is still nearby.

This particular tension between insignificance and relief is something I keep coming back to because I think we underestimate how formative that moment is. It’s not just a pretty childhood memory. It’s training. It’s the first time many of us learn that contradictory feelings can coexist without one of them being wrong.

Cognitive Dissonance Was Built on Shakier Ground Than We Thought

The irony of Festinger’s cognitive dissonance framework is that its foundational study may itself be an example of belief persisting despite disconfirming evidence. A recent paper by Thomas Kelly, published in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, examined Festinger’s recently unsealed archival papers and found significant problems with the original 1956 book When Prophecy Fails.

The book claimed that followers of Dorothy Martin, a Chicago housewife who predicted a world-ending flood and alien rescue, doubled down on their beliefs after the prophecy failed. This became the canonical example of cognitive dissonance in action: when reality contradicts your beliefs, you don’t abandon the beliefs; you strengthen them.

But Kelly’s archival research tells a different story. He found that the Seekers, as Martin’s followers were called, actually showed clear signs of quickly abandoning their beliefs when the UFOs failed to arrive. According to Kelly’s findings, Martin herself later distanced herself from the events, reportedly telling an interviewer in the 1980s that she had never believed she’d be taken away by an actual spaceship. Kelly’s paper alleges that the researchers committed scientific misconduct, including fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation.

One of the more striking findings involves Henry Riecken, a researcher who embedded himself in the group and achieved high status among members. According to Riecken’s own notes in the unsealed archives, after the spacemen initially failed to land, Riecken mocked Martin, then privately told another member, Charles Laughead, that he was struggling with doubt. Laughead responded with a passionate monologue about commitment, saying he had given up everything, cut every bridge, turned his back on the world, and couldn’t afford to doubt.

Riecken then returned to the group, proclaimed his faith restored, and Martin began writing what would become her Christmas message. The researcher had manufactured the very behavior the study claimed to observe.

This doesn’t mean cognitive dissonance isn’t real. People clearly do experience discomfort when their beliefs and actions conflict. But the foundational narrative, the story that says people always double down on broken beliefs, may have been shaped more by the researchers’ expectations than by what actually happened.

What This Means for the Kid on the Grass

Here’s why the shakiness of Festinger’s original study matters for our purposes. If cognitive dissonance theory is right that humans are wired to eliminate contradictions, then the child who feels both terrified and relieved by the night sky should be in distress. She should be trying to pick one feeling and suppress the other. Terror or relief, not both.

But children don’t do that. Watch them. A child can be afraid of the dark and fascinated by it. She can want to go home and want to keep looking. She can cry and then laugh. Children are better at holding contradictions than adults are, not because they’re simpler, but because they haven’t yet learned the adult habit of forcing coherence onto every internal state.

Research on knowledge acquisition and aesthetic chills suggests that the physical sensation of awe, the goosebumps, the shiver, the catch in the breath, is closely tied to moments of learning. The body responds to the gap between what it knows and what it’s encountering. That gap is a contradiction. And rather than resolving it, the body leans into it. It produces chills not as a warning but as a signal of engagement.

The kid on the grass who feels terrified and relieved is, neurologically and emotionally, in a state of maximum engagement. Her brain is building new structures. Her body is signaling that something important is happening. The contradiction is the engine, not the obstacle.

The Questions That Come From Holding Two Things at Once

Every meaningful question I can think of starts with a contradiction. Is the universe indifferent or meaningful? Am I free or determined? Do I matter or don’t I? These aren’t questions with answers. They’re questions with tension. And the tension is what keeps you thinking.

I wrote recently about people who choose dangerous frontiers, and one of the things that struck me about astronauts, polar explorers, and deep-sea divers is that they all describe a version of this childhood moment. They remember the first time the world felt both terrifying and beautiful, and they spent the rest of their lives chasing that exact feeling. Not the terror alone. Not the beauty alone. The both.

The philosopher Aristotle argued that philosophy begins in wonder. But what he meant by “wonder” (thaumazein in Greek) wasn’t simple delight. It was closer to astonishment. Bewilderment. A state where the world is suddenly strange enough to require explanation. That strangeness carries fear in it. If the world needs explaining, it means you don’t understand it yet. And not understanding the world you live in is, if you think about it honestly, terrifying.

The relief comes from the discovery that not understanding is survivable. You don’t have to have an answer in order to keep going. You can hold the question open. This is what distinguishes curiosity from anxiety: anxiety needs resolution, curiosity can live without it.

Growing Up Means Learning to Close What Should Stay Open

Something happens between childhood and adulthood that narrows this capacity. We learn to categorize. Safe or dangerous. True or false. Us or them. Growing up on the border in El Paso, I watched this sorting instinct play out in real time, on both sides of the line. People on one side had a story about the other side. The stories were coherent. They eliminated contradiction. And they were almost always incomplete.

The child who can hold terror and relief simultaneously has a cognitive advantage that most adults have trained out of themselves. She can tolerate ambiguity. She can sit with information that doesn’t resolve into a single clear signal. Research on curiosity and individual differences in learning suggests that this tolerance for ambiguity is one of the strongest predictors of intellectual engagement. People who can hold open questions without premature closure learn more, retain more, and ask better follow-up questions.

The education system, unfortunately, rewards closure. The right answer. The filled bubble. The resolved essay. And workplaces reward it even more aggressively. I spent enough years in DC to see how policymaking punishes ambiguity: you need a position, a recommendation, a bottom line. The person who admits they’re still thinking about it doesn’t get invited back to the meeting.

But the best policy thinkers I worked with on the Hill, the ones who actually understood the systems they were writing legislation about, were the ones who could hold competing truths in their heads longer than everyone else. They could see that a program was both wasteful and necessary. That a country was both an adversary and a partner. That a technology was both dangerous and essential. The ability to sit in that contradiction without collapsing it prematurely is what produced good analysis. And it’s the same skill that the child on the grass was developing without knowing it.

The Letter

So here it is, as plainly as I can say it: if you looked at the night sky as a child and felt both terrified and relieved, you weren’t confused. You were doing something that most adults have forgotten how to do. You were holding two truths at the same time and letting both of them be real.

The terror told you something true: the universe is vast and you are small and nothing guarantees your significance. The relief told you something equally true: you are here anyway, awake and breathing and capable of registering the vastness, and that capacity is itself a kind of answer.

Those two truths don’t cancel each other out. They generate a third thing, which is the question. Why am I here? What does it mean that I can see this? What should I do with the time I have? These are not questions with tidy endings. They’re questions that keep opening.

I watch my son sometimes when we’re outside after dark, when he’s looking up and goes quiet. I don’t know exactly what he’s feeling, but I recognize the posture. The stillness. The way his body is both tense and relaxed. He’s holding something that doesn’t fit together yet. And I have no intention of helping him resolve it.

The contradiction is the gift. It always was.

Every meaningful question you’ve ever asked started there, on your back in the grass, afraid and free at the same time. The people who kept asking those questions are the ones who remembered what it felt like to not know and didn’t rush to make it stop. They let the discomfort stay. They let the sky be bigger than their understanding. And from that gap between what they felt and what they could explain, everything else followed.

That’s not a disorder. That’s not dysfunction. Cognitive dissonance theory would call it discomfort and predict you’d try to eliminate it. But the best version of you, the most curious and alive and honest version, is the one that learned, at age seven, to let the discomfort stay a little longer.

The night sky is still there. The contradiction hasn’t gone anywhere. You can go back to it anytime you want.

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