Awe Walks: The Simple Practice of Walking Until the World Grows Large

There is a particular feeling that arrives, unbidden, perhaps a few times a year: standing under a proper night sky far from streetlights, or at the rim of something vast, or in the nave of a cathedral when the organ suddenly opens. The skin prickles. The breath catches. And for a moment the self, that noisy, anxious, ever-narrating self, goes quiet, not because it has been argued down but because it has been made small by comparison. Psychologists call the feeling awe. The rest of us mostly call it wonder, and assume it cannot be scheduled.

The interesting news is that it can be, at least a little. Over the past decade, researchers studying awe have found that it behaves less like a rare event and more like a faculty: a way of looking that can be deliberately practised, most simply in the form of what has come to be called an awe walk. The recipe is almost embarrassingly modest. You go for a walk, as you might anyway. The only change is where you point your attention.

The study of the small self

The formal version comes from research at the University of California, San Francisco, where healthy older adults were asked to take a fifteen-minute walk each week for eight weeks. Half were given no particular instruction beyond walking; the other half were asked to take awe walks: to seek out somewhere new when possible, and during the walk to attend to vastness and detail, big skies, old trees, the pattern in a leaf, with the openness of a first encounter. Participants photographed themselves along the way and reported on their emotions. Over the weeks, the awe walkers reported growing prosocial positive emotions, things like compassion and gratitude, and greater joy on the walks themselves; charmingly, their selfies changed too, the self shrinking in the frame as the scenery grew, a literal picture of what the researchers called the small self (Sturm et al., 2020, Emotion).

It is a small study, and one should not build a temple on it. But it agrees with a broader body of work on awe suggesting that experiences of vastness quiet self-referential thinking, the mind's default churn of me and mine, and tilt people towards generosity and connection. The feeling of being made small, it turns out, is not a diminishment. It is a relief. Most of our misery requires us to be the largest thing in view.

The feeling of being made small is not a diminishment. It is a relief. Most of our misery requires us to be the largest thing in view.

What makes a walk an awe walk

Awe, in the research, tends to have two ingredients: vastness, something larger than the self or beyond its usual frame, and a need for accommodation, the pleasant strain of the mind stretching to take it in. Neither requires the Grand Canyon. Vastness is available in the height of a plane tree, the age of a church wall, the sheer number of leaves on an ordinary street in September. The stretching happens whenever you consider what you are actually looking at: that the light on your hands left the sun eight minutes ago; that the oak was here before every person you have ever met; that ten thousand starlings are somehow not colliding. Awe is less a property of places than a depth of looking, which is why two people can take the same walk and only one of them comes back changed.

The practice, then, is a walk with three light adjustments. Go somewhere with a little novelty if you can, because familiarity is awe's quietest enemy. Leave the phone in a pocket, because awe requires an uninterrupted gaze and cannot compete with a feed. And walk at a pace that lets you stop, because awe tends to arrive precisely at the moments we usually walk past.

A few places awe reliably hides

If you are unsure where to point yourself, the tradition of contemplative walking and the awe research agree on certain reliable haunts. Treat these as starting suggestions rather than a syllabus:

• Upwards: tree canopies, cloudbanks, tall buildings seen from their base, and any sky within an hour of sunrise or sunset.
• Old things: ancient trees, worn stone steps, rivers, anything that makes your own timescale feel briefly like a rumour.
• Multitudes: murmurations, crowds seen from a bridge, a night sky dark enough to show depth, rain moving across a valley.
• Small vastness: frost patterns, moss forests on a wall, the veins of a leaf held to the light, where the scale runs the other way.

City dwellers need not feel excluded: the researchers' participants found awe in both natural and urban settings, and a railway station roof or a cathedral of cranes can stretch the mind as surely as a forest. For the days when neither is reachable, screens can keep the faculty warm, if they are used slowly: I sometimes let Feelsy's vast, unhurried textures drift on autoplay in the evening the way one might watch weather, ten minutes of something bigger and slower than my own concerns. It is not a substitute for the plane tree. It is practice for noticing it.

Wonder as a discipline

There is something faintly comic about scheduling wonder, I admit: fifteen minutes of transcendence, Tuesdays. But the comedy dissolves once you try it. What the schedule provides is not the awe itself, which cannot be commanded, but the conditions in which awe is likely: the walk taken, the eyes lifted, the phone silenced, the pace slowed. The old contemplative traditions understood this perfectly well; their pilgrimages, processions and circumambulations were, among other things, awe walks with better costumes. The world has not grown less vast since. It is only that we have grown practised at not looking, and practice, fortunately, runs in both directions.

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