16 small moments that feel like a hug

I hear the most wholesome stories every week.

They come in on Saturdays. Little dispatches from our walk hosts across ten cities.

Some are voice memos, recorded right after the walk, still slightly breathless. Some are typed out in the parking lot before they drive home. Some are just a line dropped into the group chat at 11 AM on a Saturday that makes me stop whatever I'm doing and read it twice.

And every week, there's a moment. Sometimes it's one line. Sometimes it's a whole scene with a video attached. Something that makes me put my phone down and think: this is why we do this.

I want to give these moments their own space, because small moments create the big ones.

Here’s what happens when you get people moving, phones away, talking about something that goes beyond the surface.

1. The whole group went vulnerable at once.

There was a new walker in Denver. Nervous. Didn't know what to expect.

About a mile in, one of the regulars opened up about something personal. The new person went quiet. Surprised, maybe a little uncomfortable. And then something shifted. One by one, everyone in the group matched the energy and shared their own version of the same thing.

By the end of the walk, the host asked the new walker how they felt. They said they couldn't believe how open everyone was.

"It wasn't just one person who shared something vulnerable. It was the whole group. That was special."

It usually starts with one person willing to go first. Then that courage spreads to everyone.

2. They sang Happy Birthday. Then they went to dim sum.

Alice's birthday fell on a walk week. The group knew.

They sang.

She posted about it in the group chat, saying “I feel so grateful and loved by this community.” After the walk, some of the group headed to dim sum together. Same people who'd been strangers not that long ago, now eating together on a Saturday morning in San Francisco.

And then… people started talking about taking a road trip together. Just casually, the way you do with people you've been friends with for years.

Alice has been hosting in San Francisco for months. She cultivated something that hundreds of people look forward to, and now the something has a life of its own. People are planning road trips. They're going to dim sum. They're singing in parking lots.

That's the graduation from event to community. It doesn't announce itself. You just look up one day and realize the people on the walk are now the people in your life.

3. The uncle who noticed more than a walk.

Izzy's uncle was passing through Detroit. His flight hadn't left yet, and she didn't even know he was coming.

He walked with the group. And afterward, he pulled her aside with something she wasn't expecting. He said he noticed the walk’s structure – the speech, the topics, the way the whole thing is designed to create openings – and he could feel it working on him in real time. He noticed how the walk’s design created space for deeper conversation, especially with his niece. That it was way more than a walk and talk. It was a curated container for something he wouldn't have gotten at the dinner table.

He got clarity about his relationships that day. On a trail. In a city he doesn't even live in.

And to his surprise, some of the biggest insights came from his niece.

Izzy said it meant a lot coming from him; they don't talk that much in regular life. Going on this walk together outside their normal day-to-day relationship generated a moment between them that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

He noticed.

That's the walk in action. Sometimes it takes a stranger – or a family member from another state – to see it most clearly.

4. The quote that stopped everyone: "I don't want to need. I want to want."

Cameron wrote it in bold. He couldn't stop thinking about it.

Someone on the Austin walk said it in the middle of a conversation about self-love and relationships. About the difference between choosing someone from a grounded place versus grasping at them from an anxious one.

“I don't want to need. I want to want.”

The whole group went quiet. Then it opened up into one of those conversations that somehow touches everything: boundaries, intimacy, the version of yourself that shows up when you're not scared.

Seven words. Sixty minutes on the trail, hearing well-timed wisdom from strangers in the Texas sun.

5. A regular baked cinnamon rolls for Cristina.

Handmade. Fresh. As a thank you for hosting.

Cristina hosts in London every week. She shows up, holds the space, opens the conversation, keeps things moving for five miles. And one week, one of her regulars showed up with something warm for her.

When people start baking for each other, something has graduated from "event I attend" to "people I care about." That graduation doesn't happen because you tried to make it happen. It happens because you kept showing up until it did.

6. Detroit kept stopping for the animals.

Izzy hosts along the Detroit River. In January. Which means she's been leading a group of people through freezing temperatures every Saturday since the year started, and somehow she’s built one of the most loyal regular bases in our network.

But the animals deserve their own moment.

Week one: the river was steaming. The ice on the surface was melting, and the heat rising off the water was visible in the cold air. This slow, thick exhale floating up from the river. Izzy pointed it out. The whole group stopped walking. Nobody said anything. They just watched, and a bird landed on the trail and they stopped for that too.

A few weeks later: a woodpecker. Everyone stopped again. Izzy posted it to the group chat like it was a completely normal Saturday update: "Made the crew stop to look at a woodpecker."

Then, a few weeks after that: two large birds circling overhead. Izzy thought they were hawks. A new member – first or second walk – said no, those are eagles. Detroit has a special relationship with bald eagles; there are organizations that actively help them breed and nest in the city. He knew the whole story. So the group stood there, on the trail in the cold, regulars learning something from the newcomer, everyone looking up together.

Three different Saturdays. Three different animals. One group that keeps deciding, without discussion, that the living world around them is worth stopping for.

7. Someone recognized a face. Three thousand miles from home.

Alice hosts in San Francisco. One Saturday, in our host group chat, she noticed a familiar face in the group photo from London.

“Omg! That’s an SF regular on the London walk!”

I keep thinking about what that means for what we're building. At some point, the walk becomes a kind of passport. You can land in a city you've never lived in and still find your people before lunch.

8. Someone drove over an hour to walk with us.

She came from a rural town outside Atlanta. Drove 27 miles – more than an hour round trip – just to walk with strangers on the Beltline.

She didn't announce it; our host found out in passing.

There are people who can't get this easily. Who don't live in walkable cities, who don't have a built-in community, who have to actually work to find a group where real conversation is the whole point.

She drove over an hour because “a group like this is worth the effort.”

Sohil in Atlanta ends the walk with flair: the group puts their hands in the middle of a huddle and shouts one word together. It's a small thing. But small things become rituals, and rituals become the reason people come back.

9. The taco pit stop.

The Detroit crew finished the walk one week and just... didn't leave.

Izzy posted it to the group chat: "Today's crew made a taco pit stop!" She also had a 50-meter sprint with one of the younger members because “she had so much energy she needed to get it out.” He won, but to be fair, he had longer legs so she wasn't too bothered about it.

This is what it looks like when a community is working. Nobody is rushing home. The walk ended and people just kept going… into tacos, into more conversation, into another hour of each other's company.

It started as a walk. It became a Saturday.

10. "Tanya delivered me a mic drop and I'm absolutely done for the day."

Alison hosts in Columbus, Ohio. She's been at it long enough that her regulars have texture now: personalities, histories, a way of talking to each other that only develops with time.

Tanya is one of those regulars. Outgoing, full of personality, and consistently tells Alison “This is the best meetup I’ve ever attended.” Walk by walk, since she first joined last autumn, she’s become someone who pays attention to herself. She’s even asked Alison for perspective on how she comes across to others. (Our hosts learn to spot and deliver “social feedback” that has transformed a few dozen social lives.)

One Saturday, the two of them ended up at the front of the group. Alison had brought a topic: what do you wish someone had told you, that they never did? And somehow that question led to Alison admitting she sometimes gets frustrated with her family for not telling her when things are wrong.

Tanya said, “Can I share a story with you?”

She told Alison about her dad, and how he used to ask the same thing: “Why don't you tell me what's going on?” and how Tanya and her sister finally answered him:

“Because of your reaction when we do.”

Alison kept walking. Let it land.

She's someone who, by her own admission, goes straight into organize-and-solve mode when the people she loves bring her a problem. “Have you called the doctor? Why is the appointment so far out? Are you using your insurance?”

She said it felt like being smacked in the face by truth.

She turned around and said to the rest of the group: “I'm leaving. I'm going home. Tanya's delivered me a mic drop and I'm absolutely done for the day!”

They all laughed. She meant it, and carried this moment home with her.

That's the thing about a question asked in the right container. It opens a window in someone's chest and shows them something they've been standing next to for years without seeing.

11. The whole group slowed down for a non-native English speaker.

He's been coming for a while. Most weeks, conversations splinter, overlap, speed up. His English is still developing, and sometimes things move too fast to follow.

One Saturday, only three people showed up in Denver. The host and one other regular just noticed. And without making a thing of it, they slowed everything down. Chose simpler words. Left more space between thoughts. Let the conversation breathe.

It was the first walk, the host said, where this person was able to fully engage from beginning to end.

Just humans being wholesome.

12. London Walk #22 started in the rain and ended in sunshine.

Cristina wrote about it like this: "This walk’s weather felt so fitting because that's kind of what life is, isn't it? You just have to keep showing up, and eventually, the clouds disappear and you're able to see the sun again."

There were only three of them that day. Small groups do something different. They let you go deeper, wider, in more directions at once. She said she left reinvigorated despite walking in feeling "sort of meh."

Three people, five miles, and a sky that brightened as their moods did.

13. Someone reframed death on a walk.

One of Izzy's regulars had a fear of loss. She didn't believe in reincarnation and hadn't found a way to make peace with the idea that things end.

Izzy offered her a different frame: what if death isn't an ending, but a return? Love as a kind of home state – unconditional, unfiltered – and our time on earth is the experience of being away from it, and then going back.

The walker got quiet. Izzy said she watched something settle in her.

That conversation happened on a Saturday morning walk. In Detroit. In January.

14. Kids came to the San Francisco walk and changed the whole energy.

Alice reported it from the group chat: “they brought so much joy!” A group of adults mid-conversation about identity or purpose or what makes a friendship real, and then… a kid bulldozing into the conversation and making everyone laugh.

Kids don't do small talk. They don't do performance. They just run ahead and ask if that's a bug and want to know why the sky is blue and remind you that curiosity doesn't have to be complicated. That paying attention is enough.

The group loved them. Of course they did.

15. A man stopped walking to say: you changed how I see this.

The host didn't catch exactly what they'd been talking about.

Just the moment.

Two guys, mid-conversation, somewhere on the trail in Denver. One of them turned to the other and said: "I'm so glad I came here today. After talking with you, it's allowed me to see the situation I've been having in my life in a completely new way."

He wasn't talking to the host. He was talking to a stranger he'd met an hour before.

That's the thing about these walks. The host holds the container. But then people find each other inside it and do something nobody planned for.

16. She was hesitant to get out of her car.

It was Jane’s first time. Izzy could tell, standing in the parking lot, that she was nervous. Sitting in her car a little longer than everyone else. Taking a beat before she got out.

By the end of the walk, Jane said she couldn't believe how easy it was, and how naturally she'd talked to a group of people she’d never met before.

Jane is a music producer. She knows a song is good because her pitbull starts dancing to it. She's bright, bubbly, funny. A joy to be around with a smile that makes you smile, too.

But she sat in her car, wondering if she should get out.

That's the thing about showing up when you're nervous: the courage isn't visible from the outside. Nobody on the trail knows what it cost you to get out of the car.

They just see you walking beside them as a totally clean slate.

Sixteen moments. Ten cities' worth of Saturdays.

Community is built on small moments of connection like this.

A bird. A cinnamon roll. A sprint with a stranger who had longer legs. A woman sitting in her car, working up the nerve to join her first event.

Small is what I'm after. Small is the whole thing.

We live in a world that only counts big, but one thing I’ve learned through bringing this movement around the world is that real connection is built in the small moments in between.

Reading these stories every week reminds me that humans are good.

They are trying. They are showing up in the cold, sliding out of cars they weren't sure they should leave, slowing down their sentences for the person beside them who needs a little more space. They are baking for each other. They are planning road trips with people they met on a trail three months ago.

Most of this happens and it just dissolves into the air, like the steam coming off that Detroit river in January. I'm trying to catch some of it before it does. To bottle it up and share it.

Because humans are good.