what the research honestly says about the awe walk

Sixty older adults agreed to take one fifteen-minute walk each week, for eight weeks. Half were given a single extra instruction: walk as if seeing everything for the first time — look for what is vast, or old, or intricate. An awe walk. The other half simply walked.

Over the weeks, the awe group reported more joy and more warm, other-directed feeling during their walks. In the weekly photographs the study had them take of themselves, their own faces occupied less and less of the frame — the self, quite literally, getting smaller in the picture as the world got larger.

And the honest half of the result, which this page will always give you: the standard questionnaires of anxiety, low mood and life satisfaction did not move in either group. Wonder improved the walks. It did not improve the paperwork.

Calibration: one small study, older adults rather than children, self-report throughout. But notice what the instruction cost — nothing — and what it required: the same road, plus the intention to look. That is the setting children run on by default until roughly Class 5, when the world begins asking them to walk sensibly.

Tomorrow holds at least one ordinary walk for you. Borrow the instruction back. The road has been rehearsing its details for years; nothing further is required of you than the looking.