Older adults asked to take a weekly walk and let themselves be amazed came home feeling smaller in the best way, more generous and more joyful, and the shift showed even in the widening of their smiles.
The study, led by Virginia Sturm and published in 2020, followed sixty healthy older adults for eight weeks. Half were asked to take a fifteen-minute walk once a week; the other half were asked to do the same, but to walk with awe, approaching each outing with fresh eyes and letting themselves be moved by the vast or the lovely, a sweeping view, the veins of a single leaf, the arch of an old building. The awe walkers reported steadily more compassion and gratitude as the weeks passed, and in the selfies they snapped along the way their own figures shrank in the frame while the world around them grew, their smiles spreading wider.
Why wonder makes us larger by making us small
Awe is the feeling of meeting something bigger than ourselves, and it does something quietly useful: it hushes the chatter of the self. Researchers call the result the “small self,” a healthy sense of one’s own proportions that turns attention outward, toward other people and the wider world, and loosens the grip of private worry. For a mind prone to circling its own troubles, a dose of wonder is a door swung open onto everything else.
Wonder shrinks the self to its right size, and the world rushes back in.
A walk anyone can take
The instruction is gentle and costs nothing. Choose a new route or an old one seen freshly, leave the phone in a pocket, slow the pace, and look up, letting yourself be struck by whatever is grand or intricate. A garden, a shoreline, a night sky, a cathedral of trees, all of it will do. For an older adult, an awe walk folds movement, daylight, and meaning into a single short outing, and tilts the whole mood toward warmth.
The study was small and ran only eight weeks, and awe is a feeling each person meets in their own way, so this is an invitation more than a formula. No single walk rewrites a hard season. What stands is a lovely and well-pointed idea: that deliberately seeking wonder, on foot and on purpose, can soften the self and brighten how an aging heart meets the world.