The Quiet Healing Power of Wonder
As we've been caring for aging parents and walking through recent hospital stays with our family, I've found myself thinking back to my own years as a nurse.
What really contributes to healing, and what quietly gets overlooked?
In nursing school, you learn how to read monitors, recognize changes in blood pressure, oxygen saturation, heart rhythm, and lab values. You learn which medications to administer and when to intervene. You spend countless hours studying the body and what happens when it begins to fail.
Those things matter. I'm grateful I learned them.
But looking back after more than twenty years in healthcare, I'm surprised by something we never talked about in nursing school.
Wonder.
No one ever taught us that.
We spent so much time learning how to respond once people became sick. We became very good at treating the consequences of disease. But there was very little conversation about the conditions that help people flourish long before they become patients.
We didn't talk about the quiet healing that happens during a slow walk through the woods.
We didn't talk about the way laughter softens a tense body.
We didn't talk about purpose, creativity, meaningful relationships, or spiritual practices that steady us when life feels uncertain.
We certainly didn't talk about standing still long enough to watch a bee move from flower to flower.
That might sound almost too simple. But I've come to believe it isn't.
living in awe
The older I get, the more I realize that health is about much more than preventing illness.
It's about becoming the kind of person who regularly experiences awe.
That word has become more meaningful to me over the years.
Awe isn't excitement or entertainment. It's that quiet feeling you get when something reminds you that you're part of something much larger than yourself.
It might happen while watching the morning light filter through the trees.
Or listening to birds before the rest of the world wakes up.
Or watching the wind move through tall grass.
Nothing dramatic is happening.
Yet somehow, everything inside you becomes a little quieter.
Nature has become one of my greatest teachers.
Not because it gives me answers.
Because it reminds me to pay attention.
I've noticed that when I'm outside, my breathing naturally slows. My thoughts become less scattered. Problems that felt enormous begin to find their proper size.
The garden has taught me patience.
The changing seasons have taught me that rest isn't failure.
The birds remind me every morning that life keeps moving with remarkable consistency, whether I'm paying attention or not.
There is something deeply regulating about simply being present in the natural world.
Researchers now understand that time in nature can lower stress hormones, improve mood, restore attention, and even increase feelings of gratitude and hope. But long before science gave us those explanations, people instinctively knew that stepping outside changed something inside us.
Maybe we were never meant to spend all of our days surrounded by walls, artificial light, and constant noise.
Maybe our nervous systems still remember the rhythm they were created for.
Read more: 7 Life Lessons You Can Learn From The Garden
cultivating health
One of the things that surprised me most during my years in healthcare was how little attention was given to these quieter forms of healing.
The focus was understandably on the immediate needs before us. Stabilize the patient. Relieve the symptoms. Treat the infection. Lower the blood pressure.
Those things save lives.
But I often wonder what would happen if we devoted just as much attention to the everyday practices that help people stay well in the first place.
Fresh air.
Natural light.
Deep, restorative sleep.
Movement.
Meaningful connection.
Purpose.
Beauty.
Wonder.
Not because these things replace good medical care.
But because they create conditions where health has room to grow.
the hope we all need
I've come to believe that one of our greatest losses isn't simply that we've become disconnected from nature.
It's that we've lost our sense of wonder.
We rush past the ordinary because we're looking for something extraordinary.
Yet the extraordinary has been quietly happening all around us.
A seed becoming food.
Rain nourishing dry ground.
Butterflies appearing where caterpillars once crawled.
Tiny wildflowers growing in places no one planted them.
A sky that never looks quite the same two evenings in a row.
The more I notice these things, the more hopeful I become.
And hope is something our world desperately needs.
Hope reminds us that change is possible.
That healing is possible.
That tomorrow doesn't have to look exactly like today.
I still appreciate everything nursing taught me.
It gave me knowledge that has served me well.
But some of the most important lessons I've learned about health didn't come from a classroom or a hospital.
They came from walking barefoot through the garden.
From sitting quietly under old trees and listening to birdsong.
From seeing the sun rise morning after morning.
From remembering that my body doesn't just need nutrients or sleep, or movement.
It also needs beauty.
It needs stillness.
It needs reminders that life is bigger than my worries.
Maybe that's one of the simplest habits we can recover.
Not another supplement.
Not another protocol.
Just the quiet practice of noticing.
Because sometimes healing begins the moment we stop trying so hard to control everything... and simply allow ourselves to be filled with wonder again.
Annette