WALK THIS WAY
As scientists probed the benefits of awe walking, I found peace and hope in the wonderland outside my door
Five minutes’ walk from home, in the first spring of the pandemic, my dog and I crossed a playing field where teams didn’t play anymore. All I meant to do was take a shortcut to the park, but a marvel stopped me. The water fountain, where water was no longer on offer, held three shiny apples. Whoever placed them there had the eye of an artist and the heart of a good Samaritan. Hungry people had been roaming my neighborhood in search of food. One of them would soon take the apples, but first I snapped a photo. I’d been struggling with another kind of hunger — for astonishment, for beauty, for the sense of being swept up by something greater than my anxious, Covid-weary self. The accidental still life nourished me. I had to remember this moment.
For years I’ve walked with an eye out for marvels. My smartphone makes it easy to record them; my dog ensures I never miss a day. I pause for the spiderweb that glistens like a necklace, for the bee exploring a coreopsis, for the bouquet of peonies abandoned on the sidewalk. In the long months of going nowhere, this habit became my superpower. Jews ask at the Passover table, “How is this night different from all other nights?” I asked on my morning rounds, “How is this walk different from all other walks?” On familiar city blocks, I made discoveries every day.
Science now has a name for this ritual of mine — awe walking. And researchers are proving the benefits. According to a U.S. study published last fall, awe walking not only makes us happier, it fosters gratitude, compassion and admiration, so-called “prosocial emotions” that bind us to others. When the popular press picked up the study, I realized I didn’t have a superpower after all. I had something better: a community of awestruck walkers. I felt like shouting to the uninitiated, “Give this a try! It works!”
The study zeroed in on older adults. Lead author Virginia Sturm, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Francisco, was looking for a simple, accessible way to keep people engaged throughout life by stimulating prosocial emotions. While most people seem to get better as they age at tuning in to the positive and screening out the negative, some of us become prone to loneliness and anxiety in our mid-70s. Most anyone, anywhere can take a walk. An ordinary walk has already been compared to a wonder drug, with well-established health benefits ranging from weight control and depression relief to reduced risk of diabetes and cancer. Sturm set her sights on emotional benefits. If walkers learned to cultivate awe, could walking be even more wondrous?
Awe is the amazement that stops you in the presence of something vast. By confounding your notion of the way things are, it lifts you into another realm of thought and feeling. A growing body of research has shown that it promotes generosity and kindness. In a Chinese study, it inspired environmental action (for example, saving energy and driving less). “When we feel awe, we don’t think about ourselves and our problems,” says Sturm. “We think about the larger world around us.” Awe comes naturally to children looking up at a skyful of stars, but adult life tends to undermine it. We expand our own footprint with bigger homes, shinier possessions and more “likes” on social media but risk losing the humility and open-heartedness of what’s known in the science of awe as “the small self.” The good news is that awe can be learned.
Dr. Sturm and her colleagues followed healthy, happy walkers aged 60 to 90s, randomly assigning them to an awe-walking group or a control group. Both groups received the same basic instructions: a weekly walk of 15 minutes, outdoors, at a light to moderate pace. They could walk anywhere at all, from the woods to a buzzing urban block. They would snap a few selfies on the way and keep a record of their impressions. No phones allowed except for taking selfies.
The awe-walking group received bonus instructions: Tap into your sense of wonder, notice details as you go, walk in new places if you can. Awe walkers quickly took to amazement. One wrote of an evergreen forest, “the leaves were no longer crunchy underfoot because of the rain and…the walk was more spongy now…. Thought about the wonder a small child feels.” Control walkers focused on their own priorities and pressures. On the brink of a vacation in Hawaii, one thought about “all the things I had to do before we leave.”
The moods of both groups brightened in the course of the eight-week study (chalk it up to the walking effect). But awe walkers had a distinct edge on happiness. They smiled more broadly on the route, according to analysis of their selfies. A more striking difference emerged over time. Awe walkers felt more connected to others, more conscious of themselves as part of a design instead of the focal point. Not bad for 15 minutes a week.
The more they practiced the art of wonder, the better they got. Their small selves bloomed — and their photos proved it. Unlike the control walkers, who centered every shot on themselves, the awe walkers stood at the edge of the frame, letting the background shine. This isn’t just a subjective impression; the researchers traced silhouettes and took pixel measurements. “The craziest thing we did,” says Sturm. “I couldn’t believe it would work but it did.”
Launched well before the pandemic, the study made news as the second wave began and the world reached out for hope. Instagrammers created new hashtags, #awewalks, #awewalk and #awewalking. In more than 20 million posts and counting, they share awesome finds that ranged from wildflowers in Greece to fresh snow in downtown Boston. Some awe walkers marvel at waterfalls and rainbows, others at the majesty of a cathedral or the shapely girders of a bridge. For every photo of an owl or a camel, there’s a multitude of happy dogs. Awe is wherever you find it. And awe-inspiring finds turn up in the most unpromising places.
While walking to the supermarket, I pass one of those mom-and-pop stores where the window is always smudged and the produce out front a little tired. It never crossed my mind to stop there until the sandwich board appeared, hand-lettered in red magic marker — someone’s tribute to a landlord who had died. “Dear Curtis. I will so miss you, your smile, your hugs. If it was not [for] you, your trust, your encouragement, I wouldn’t exist. Because of you, NEW IMMIGRANTS LIKE ME CAN DREAM.” A wave of sympathy washed my mind clean of everything but Curtis and the void he left in the world. I had planned to buy avocados at the supermarket but picked a few from the bin in front of me, just so I could tell the woman at the cash, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Curtis was gone but his gift remained — and made my day. When I posted my photo of the sign on Facebook, 62 people liked the story it told about the power of an ordinary business transaction to become a life-changing friendship.
Seven years later, my photo keeps the memory fresh. It sits in the digital file that holds my favorite awe-walking moments. When cruelty and discord fill the news, these photos turn my attention to beauty and community. In an increasingly polarized world, couldn’t we all use a dose of awe? The notion intrigues Jennifer Stellar, a psychologist who directs the University of Toronto’s Health, Emotions and Altruism Lab. In one of many tantalizing studies, awe-struck people were more likely to identify themselves as human rather than by traits (smart) or role (mother). Says Stellar, “Awe might have the power to help us see past characteristics that divide us like race or culture or ideology, and instead see our shared commonality as human beings.”
The science of awe has deep roots in psychology’s earliest days. As William James wrote in Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” While you’re captivated by the wondrous, you will not be consumed by the worrisome. You will enter the restorative, rejuvenating state known as mindfulness. I used to think that mindfulness meant sitting with my eyes closed, following my breath and getting bored. I took a course on mindfulness meditation, but the habit didn’t stick. No matter.
In the second month of the pandemic, when going out seemed potentially lethal but staying in felt like a sentence, I attended a virtual lecture by “the mother of mindfulness,” Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer. At 73 she zipped so fast between ideas so fast that on my third replay I was still catching up. You needn’t meditate to be mindful, she explained. There’s one simple ground rule: “Notice new things.” Just what I was doing on every walk with my dog. Awe walking, although I didn’t know it. In the act of noticing what offered itself to my eyes, I shook myself out of autopilot. I saw what was beautiful and real right now, instead of what I’d always seen before. What I could still enjoy instead of what the pandemic had taken. “Life consists only of moments,” said Langer. “And if we make the moments matter, then our lives matter and our days have been well spent.”
Last May, as Toronto began to open up, I took my dog to the meadow at the edge of Corktown Common. Compared to the rest of the park, the meadow used to strike me as drab. That day a swath of dandelions had turned it gold. I thought of the field of daffodils that inspired William Wordsworth, a prodigious walker, to write his famous poem — one I first encountered in grade eight English. As a cynical 13-year-old, I couldn’t get excited about “fluttering and dancing” flowers. As an awe walker emerging from lockdown, I finally understood. More than 200 years after Wordsworth took a walk and found the daffodils, his awe was compounding my own. Maybe that’s the best thing about awe: It’s catching.
Previously published in Zoomer, October/November 2021
