Chapter 25: The Awe Practice

In Chapter 14, we made the case for awe as the fastest path to thicker time. Now let's make it practical.

The biggest misconception about awe is that it requires something extraordinary. A sunset over the Grand Canyon. A symphony at the opera. A once-in-a-lifetime encounter. If that were true, awe would be too rare to be useful. The point is that awe is available daily, if you know where to find it.

Dacher Keltner's research found that when people logged daily experiences of awe, they reported it far more frequently than they expected. It showed up in small moments: watching a child figure something out, hearing a piece of music that moved them, noticing the way light fell through a window, reading a sentence that rearranged their thinking, watching someone do something with extraordinary skill.

Awe isn't about grandeur. It's about paying attention to something that exceeds your expectations.

There are reliable sources. Nature is the most accessible. You don't need a mountain. You need to look up. The sky does something different every day. Trees in wind are endlessly complex. A bird in flight is, if you actually watch it, astonishing. Wellington is a city with hills, harbour, and weather that changes by the hour. Walking through it with open eyes is a daily opportunity for awe that I spent years ignoring because I was looking at my phone.

Music is another. Not background music. Proper listening. Put on headphones, pick something that demands your attention, and give it five minutes of real focus. The kind of listening where you notice an instrument you hadn't heard before, or a change in dynamics that catches your breath. If a piece of music gives you chills, that physical response is your nervous system signalling that something has exceeded your model. That's awe in miniature.

Skill and mastery produce awe reliably. Watching someone who is genuinely excellent at what they do, a craftsperson, an athlete, a cook, a dancer, a musician, triggers the recognition that human capacity exceeds what you casually assumed. YouTube is, for all its problems, an inexhaustible source of this. A five-minute video of a master woodworker is a five-minute awe session if you pay attention to the precision, the knowledge, the years of practice made visible in each movement.

Ideas can produce awe. A paragraph in a book that reorganises your understanding. A concept you've never encountered. A connection between two things you'd never linked. This is intellectual awe, and it's as temporally expansive as any other kind. If you're reading something and you feel a physical sensation of recognition, a widening, a "wait, really?", that's the encoding machinery firing at full capacity.

And human connection produces awe when it's deep enough. A conversation where someone reveals something true about themselves. A moment of unexpected kindness. A child asking a question that stops you cold because it's more profound than anything you've thought all week.

The practice, if we can call it that, is to seek one of these experiences at least twice a week with deliberate attention. Not passively. Actively. Go looking for it. And when you find it, stay with it. Don't move on immediately. Let it land. The temporal expansion of awe requires a few beats of processing time. If you rush past it, the encoding is shallow. If you linger, even for thirty seconds, the memory is rich.

There's a compound effect here that's worth naming. Awe doesn't just expand time in the moment. It changes your subsequent decisions. The 2012 Rudd, Vohs, and Aaker study found that awe-experiencing participants chose experiences over purchases, volunteered more of their time, and reported greater life satisfaction. These are choices that, over weeks and months, reshape your life architecture in ways that produce more thick time.

More awe leads to different choices. Different choices lead to a life that contains more awe. The cycle reinforces itself.

The practice also has a training effect. The more you look for awe, the better you get at finding it. Your perceptual filters adjust. You start noticing things you previously walked past. The world doesn't become more awesome. Your capacity to perceive what was always there increases.

I've been trying this for a few weeks. My version is unstructured and imperfect. I walk more. I look up more. I listen to music with intent rather than as wallpaper. I watch my kids with slightly more attention than I used to, which turns out to be a reliable source of both awe and comedy.

The effect on my days is hard to quantify but easy to feel. They have more moments in them. Not more events. More moments that I was actually inside of. And at the end of the week, when I try to reconstruct what happened, there's more to find.

Two deliberate awe experiences per week. That's the prescription. Not added to a packed schedule. Woven into what's already there, with the volume turned up.