Before You Leave the House This Spring, Remember: Phone, Keys, Wonder

A spring guide to renewing your wows

This past week I went to the New York Botanical Garden where my daughter told me — with a loving eye roll — that I was acting like a two-year-old because I was squealing and bouncing up and down when I saw the sweet purple crocuses pushing their cheerful little heads up through the grass and the electric yellow forsythia lighting up the landscape, screaming “we made it!”

For me, spring always brings with it a wild, unbridled joy: a mix of pure, child-like delight to see the world shift back into living color and a frenzied release to have finally broken free from winter’s captivity. Like sloughing off the 50-pound jacket of seasonal depression that I didn’t even realize I was wearing. Then running, with a delirious cackle, to and fro, arms open, eyes wide, shouting “Would you look at this world?!”

I have emerged from survival mode. I’m sobbing at the sight of daffodils. Normal spring stuff.

Wow Renewal Season

In the Mary Oliver poem When Death Comes she writes:

"When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."

I want to be able to etch this on my tombstone, so I practice wonder in all seasons. But my winter wonder is more a dutiful commitment during a rough relationship patch than a honeymoon. But when spring comes?! Well, that’s newlywed vibes.

Of course, spring has always been humanity's perennial reminder of hope and renewal. Across cultures and spiritual traditions, this season represents resurrection, rebirth, fertility, and the triumph of green shoots over greige ground.

Nowruz, the Persian New Year, begins on the spring equinox, celebrating the renewal of life and fresh beginnings. The pagan spring equinox honors the goddess Ostara with traditions like planting seeds, decorating eggs, and creating altars with spring flowers. And in Japan, people gather under flowering trees for cherry blossom viewing parties (hanami).

Growing up, my family celebrated both Catholic and Earth-based traditions. We’d celebrate solstice with a bonfire to welcome the return of the light. Dye eggs, bake rice pie, and attend mass for Easter. Then, on May Day morning, we’d rub our faces with the fresh morning dew and craft elaborate little baskets full of mosses and spring flowers to deliver to friends’ doorsteps, ringing the doorbell and running away.

Reveling in this blooming, bursting time of year runs deep. It’s WOW Renewal Season, baby! It’s a time to open our eyes, wake up, and watch the world come alive. Each unfurling leaf is nature tapping you on the shoulder saying, "Hey, don't miss this! Something amazing is happening!"

Where’d You Leave Your Wonder?

Before you leave the house this spring, remember: Keys, wallet, wonder.

Oh wait, misplaced your wonder? Makes sense. Being awed isn’t exactly our default state anymore. In our glued-to-screens life, our attention is constantly being sucked into the digital vortex.

When we stop noticing, we stop feeling connected. We lose our sense of being part of something larger and more mysterious than our daily concerns. We forget how to be surprised.

But we can spring clean our attention and retrain our brains.

In a world demanding productivity and efficiency, cultivating wonder might seem frivolous. But consider that your attention is the most valuable currency you possess. Where you spend it quite literally creates your experience of being alive.

As I write in my upcoming book chapter "Renew Your WOWs:" moments of wonder act as tiny reset buttons for the nervous system. They pull us out of rumination and worry. They situate us in the actual world rather than our stories about it. And people who regularly experience awe are actually more generous and helpful to others. It seems that when we feel small in the face of something magnificent, we feel more connected to our fellow humans.

Deliberate acts of noticing — training our consciousness like a spotlight — actually train our brains to be more attuned. So, the more we look for wonder and wows, the more our brain serves them up for us to see.

In “How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy," Jenny Odell makes a poignant observation about aliveness and the act of looking for wonder in the present:

"Maybe the point isn't to live more but to be more alive in any given moment."

That’s the gift we give ourselves when we recommit to wonder. We come more alive.

A Spring Wonder Wander

Ready to renew your wows? Here’s your mission: should you choose to accept it.

Go on a Spring Wonder Wander! Set out on a quest with your attention tuned to the frequency of wonder and delight. It can be 5 minutes or an hour. It can be in a garden, a park, around your neighborhood, or even just looking out your window. The only requirements are presence and curiosity.

Here's how:

1. Set an intention to notice what wows you (even on a micro scale)

2. Slow down

3. Use all your senses

4. Approach familiar things as if seeing them for the first time

5. Allow yourself to express delight like a two-year-old
   

Spring Wonder Wander Prompts:

1. Zoom In Curiously — Choose a bud or blade of grass to inspect up close and admire nature’s engineering feats. Notice how a bud’s perfect packaging protects its vulnerable new growth. See how, when you look at grass in detail, you can see the architecture: veins running through, a perfect taper, how it bends without breaking.

2. Listen To Spring’s Soundtrack — Close your eyes and listen for one full minute, noting every sound you can detect from closest to farthest away. Our brains filter out most sensory information to keep us from getting overwhelmed so you might be surprised at how much you hear when you stop to listen. A spring symphony!

3. Collect Colors — Soak up spring’s palette—the acid green of new leaves, the vivid yellow of forsythia, the purple-blue of crocuses. The way people dress in spring shifts too. Choose one spring color and become a collector, finding as many different expressions of that hue as you can.

4. Imagine Sunlight Traveling — Find a patch of sunlight. Close your eyes and feel the warmth on your skin. Consider that these photons traveled 93 million miles from the sun to reach your face, taking just over 8 minutes to make their journey through space. If that doesn’t wow you to think about then I don’t know what will!

5. Send A Wonder Postcard — Wonder multiplies when shared. Find one small, specific wow observation and send it along. "The magnolias on Lafayette are about to pop!" “I just spotted a swan in the East River!” You might just wake up someone else’s power of noticing.

When we pay attention to spring in the outside world, we might also see spring inside ourselves as well — the ways in which we are opening, blossoming, and changing with the seasons.

And if you do it well enough, maybe you’ll even out-wonder a child in the childlike wonder department. That would really be a wow-worthy accomplishment.

Renewing my wows