Hiii. Come sit with us for a second.
Notice how the days seem to move faster lately. The morning turns into evening before you’ve caught your breath, the week folds into the next one, and somewhere in there the feeling creeps in that time itself has quietly sped up.
Here’s something genuinely useful about that feeling.
Researchers Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker ran a set of experiments asking a simple question, what actually changes a person’s sense of how much time they have. Across several studies, the emotion that moved the needle most was awe, the feeling of standing in front of something vast, a mountain range, a piece of music, a night sky full of stars. People who experienced a moment of awe reported feeling like they had more time available, felt less rushed, and made more generous, more satisfied choices afterward, all traced back to that expanded sense of time.
This points to something worth trying today. Awe has a reputation for requiring a vacation, a canyon, a cathedral, something far away and expensive. The research suggests otherwise. A short video of a mountain vista moved people’s sense of time in the same studies. The size of the moment matters less than the size of what it points you toward, something larger than your to-do list, held for even sixty full seconds.
We’ve written before about how a wandering mind settles on whatever holds the top spot in your attention. Awe is one of the fastest ways to hand that spot something worth holding. The rushed feeling loosens its grip the moment your attention lifts toward something bigger than the clock.
Rachel Carson, who spent her life studying the natural world up close, wrote about this kind of moment with real precision.
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”
Reserves of strength, built from looking up. That’s a fair description of what an afternoon feels like on the other side of a genuine moment of awe.
Here’s today’s invitation. Find one moment today to look up and out, actually up, actually out, at the sky, a tree line, the view from wherever you happen to be standing. Give it a full sixty seconds before you look back down. Let the size of it register.
The clock keeps its pace. Your sense of how much room you have inside today gets to expand anyway.
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Sources and further reading. Rudd, M., Vohs, K.D., & Aaker, J. (2012), “Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being,” Psychological Science, 23(10), 1130-1136. Full text via the author’s site, University of Houston. Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (1965), quoted via Goodreads.