Awe

Today, in walking we routinely shift to moving in unison in ways as principled and predictable as our actions within a human wave. Consider the flow of pedestrians in cities. When sidewalks are exceptionally crowded, studies find, we fall into streams of pedestrians to cross streets, navigating tight spaces and time constraints with greater efficiency. At times this may feel alienating, when we sense we are simply a cog in a city’s machine; at other times, it’s awe-inspiring, when we feel part of a collective or cultural moment.

In one study of walking in unison, participants were brought to an unusual lab indeed: an enclosed stadium in New Zealand. There, for five minutes, in large groups, participants either walked around the stadium in sync with an experimenter, or they walked freely in their individual gaits and rhythms. Those people who walked together in synchrony, in particular, in arousing, fast movements, stayed closer to one another when asked to disperse, and worked harder on a subsequent task of picking up washers together. Walking in unison gives rise to goodwill and collaboration.

The transcendent feeling of moving in unison is at the heart of rituals and ceremonies. In a study of the narratives of Irish celebrants after St. Patrick’s Day parades and Hindu pilgrims to the Magh Mela festival in India (who engage in purification rituals in rivers), experiences of awe were an organizing theme. Celebrants spoke of being part of something much larger than themselves, of a spiritual community, and of being moved by a heightened sense of purpose. In Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History

, historian William McNeill observes the same, that walking in unison—military units marching, university bands at football games, protesters moving through the streets—activates our sense that we are serving a purpose larger than the self.

In her cultural history of walking, Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit details the revolution in walking that overtook Europe in the seventeenth century, when roads became safe and the outdoors more open to travel, wandering, and exploration. This opening of Europe to walking would give rise to forms of collective walking, from postprandial strolls in town and city squares to wandering with friends in the wild. These different kinds of walking, ranging from the more collective to the solitary, produce, in Solnit’s theorizing, an awe-like form of consciousness in which we extend the self into the environment. In walking, we may make connections, for example, between our actions and those of others with whom we are walking, between our thoughts and those of fellow human beings moving through their day, and between the contents of our minds and patterns in nature—the movements of wind through trees or the shifting clouds in the sky. In walking among others you may notice how your bodily actions are part of larger patterns that hold together human societies: schoolkids crossing a street in the early morning, office workers streaming out of buildings to get lunch, shoppers moving through a farmers market at the day’s end, young people playing pickup basketball.

Grounded in this idea that walking engages an awe-like form of consciousness, UC San Francisco neuroscientist Virginia Sturm and I developed an awe practice called the awe walk. We were simply naming what has been a universal tradition to seek awe in walking meditations, pilgrimages, hiking, backpacking, and after-dinner strolls. Here were our instructions:

Tap into your childlike sense of wonder. Young children are in an almost constant state of awe since everything is so new to them. During your walk, try to approach what you see with fresh eyes, imagining that you’re seeing it for the first time. Take a moment in each walk to take in the vastness of things, for example in looking at a panoramic view or up close at the detail of a leaf or flower.

Go somewhere new. Each week, try to choose a new location. You’re more likely to feel awe in a novel environment where the sights and sounds are unexpected and unfamiliar to you. That said, some places never seem to get old, so there’s nothing wrong with revisiting your favorite spots if you find that they consistently fill you with awe. The key is to recognize new features of the same old place.

We suggested that participants take their regular awe walk near trees or bodies of water, under the night sky, or in a place where they could view a sunrise or sunset, and if in urban areas, near large buildings, a historic monument, a neighborhood they had never been to, a stadium, or in a museum or botanical garden. Or, we concluded, they could just wander the streets.