365 Days of Wonder: The Magic of Starting an Awe Journal

The news: everything is bad.
Poets: okay, but what if everything is bad and we still fall in love with the moon and learn something from the flowers. ~Nikita Gill

My dad died when I was thirty-one. I wasn’t a child but barely felt like an adult. He had reached retirement, but only just. Mary Oliver got it right when she wrote, “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”

A few months later, I pulled myself out the door and off to work. The December weather and my heart were both raw. Then I saw it: a single …

The news: everything is bad.
Poets: okay, but what if everything is bad and we still fall in love with the moon and learn something from the flowers. ~Nikita Gill

A few months later, I pulled myself out the door and off to work. The December weather and my heart were both raw. Then I saw it: a single rosebud on a ragged bush.

I laughed aloud. A rose blooming in winter? And then I started to cry—for the wondrous absurdity of a tiny, lovely thing proclaiming its place in a dark world.

This pink bud did not make things “all better.” And yet, for a moment, I remembered that my heart was capable of feeling more than grief. It had space for wonder and delight.

I have spent the last three years studying the emotion of awe. I could share studies about how experiencing wonder makes us more generous, humble, and curious. I’ve written a whole book on the emotional, psychological, and cognitive benefits of this feeling.

But here’s one thing I really love about this thoroughly human emotion: awe doesn’t require anything from us but our attention. We don’t have to do anything to feel awe. We don’t have to be anything we are not. We just have to show up in the world, eyes and ears open.

When researchers ask people around the world to describe a moment when they experienced awe, they often point to ordinary moments. A piece of music that brought tears to their eyes. A stranger helping someone in need. A blooming cherry blossom tree. The smell of the earth after the rain. Holding someone’s hand in their final days.

This year, I made a resolution to keep an awe diary. I call it “365 Days of Wonder.” I’m drawing inspiration from my late grandmother. She kept a daily diary for over fifty years, and most of her entries are only one or two sentences. Taken together, these micro-entries paint a rich picture of the rhythm of her years.

So I feel no pressure to write a long journal entry each day. Just a sentence or two about something I saw, heard, tasted, smelled, or learned about that day that made me say, “Oh wow.”

It’s now mid-March, and I have written seventy-seven entries. Can I share a few of them?

Day 9:

Listening to President Carter’s funeral, I was touched by this reflection from his grandson, Jason Carter: “In my forty-nine years, I never perceived a difference between his public face and his private one. He was the same person. For me, that’s the definition of integrity.”

Day 27:

Last night I randomly grabbed some old fortune cookies before driving home a group of teenagers. “Here, check out your fortunes for the week,” I said. The first teen read, “You will be surrounded by the love and laughter of good friends. Ha! Well, that one already came true.”

Day 34:

While on a morning walk, I got a text from a friend. She had woken up to the sound of a neighbor shoveling her driveway—a reminder, she wrote, that there are “good people everywhere.”

Day 37:

A beautiful family friend died today. She was ninety-five, and I remember when—at nearly eighty—she spotted our family across the beach and ran full throttle to greet us, with a hand atop her head to keep her sunhat from blowing away. I want to age like that.

Day 38:

I brought Humfrid the Octopus with me on a school visit today. At the end of my presentation, a kindergarten sidled up: “Can Humfrid give me a hug?” I replied, “With eight arms, he can give you a quadruple hug!”

Day 41:

Finding a moment of wonder was harder today. So this afternoon while driving, I tried to keep my senses open. And almost instantly, I got stuck behind a school bus.

But, but, but . . . while stopped, I noticed