The Incredible Magic of Feeling Small
I love traveling to distant places that take me away from my everyday routine, away from my Point A and Point B. I especially love traveling to places that remind me how big and wondrous this planet can be. It puts me in my place, it humbles me to know that the rest of the world relentlessly marches forward to its own cadence. I am not a master of anything here but simply a moving piece playing its part in this giant interwoven narrative of life.
I’m trying to remember my earliest memories of feeling this way. Looking up towards the sky in absolute amazement. Jaws agape. I want to say it was the Grand Canyon when I was a mere 6 or 7-year-old girl, but I don’t have much recollection of it. Or perhaps it was that one time we went on a road trip from sunny California to the roaring rapid forests of Wyoming better known as Yellowstone. Was it when I watched magnificent streams of purple lightning crash unto the horizon of flat plains across Idaho? Or was it when we laid on our backs against the warm desert sands with our tents tied open, looking up into the night sky littered with stars from distant galaxies, a painfully beautiful projection of things that once were but now most likely gone?
When I travel I wonder how many people, how many strangers, have stood where I stood, felt what I felt, and thought what I had thought. What are the chances that in two different moments in time, we’ve shared the same exact perspective in sight and mind? What was it like to be the first? I wonder what it would be like to be the first to see and to experience the world as it is. Would you have known? Would you have realized that you have stumbled upon something that no intelligent being had seen or beheld before? That this very moment would belong to you and only you for a few seconds, months, centuries until another soul would stand in your place and claim it for themselves? Would you have stopped to revel in its raw beauty or would you have let the moment slip by unnoticed, too busy to look up on your way to more pressing affairs?
We are so incredibly small in comparison to the heights of trees, to the grandeur of mountain peaks, and the boundlessly expanding universe. We are but a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes... (James 4:14)
The incredible magic of feeling small is finding comfort in being enveloped in the great big world that will rotate another day again and again - that no matter what today may have been like, the world will keep on turning, and in the great scheme of it all -- it doesn’t really matter. It sounds a bit depressing when written out, but when you’re out there immersed and lost in observations, there’s this deeply profound feeling of lightness - of freedom. Sometimes it takes a minute of feeling so incredibly small to find the strength to live every day bigger than yesterday.