we are all so very tiny
How to look at a mountain and realize things will probably be ok
There’s something primally comforting about standing close to an object that’s much bigger than yourself. Standing next to a giant sequoia or seeing the silhouette of a mountain - its colossal shape almost too large to comprehend - reminds us that we are effectively very small. And there’s something very nice about that.
Getting too big for your own britches makes us sad. Take the crown off, king. Spend a day amongst the peasants.
In every single moment of our lives, being the narrator of every action, every intention, every goal, and every hurdle makes us oh so important in our own heads and much larger than everything else. It’s not our fault, it’s how we survive. If you didn’t prioritize yourself to some extent, you’d eventually starve or dehydrate or just be so stinky you die, idk.
Unfortunately, it becomes a strain to carry the weight of our past and current selves, plus the consequence of every single decision we make. Every primary choice cascades into endless secondary choices, all while every should-have, would-have, and could-still, piles up to an overwhelming landscape of potential realities to select from. It’s paralyzing enough to understand that there are 35 options for peanut butter in a grocery store, and that every choice is somehow unique in its tradeoffs. If you compound that decision hundreds of times a day, hundreds of days a year, over the decades of our life, you are left aghast against the enormity of it all.
We’re zoomed so far into our own existence that we forget that we’re only one ant, hustling and bustling around one anthill, amidst the thousands of anthills spread across a single square mile. Our mental lens only has enough space for like fifty ants max, and that’s just not enough to understand how infinitely small we are. In zooming, we grasp more detail but lose sight of context.
Most of the time, it’s great to prioritize yourself and your life arc, but occasionally, I beg of you to just chill out and bask in your tiny-ness. You do not have to take yourself so seriously. You can allow yourself to simply be, without having to race forward towards success or achievement.
If your inner voice loves to whisper “Don’t fuck this up” like every day is the finale of some universal performance, you’ll never be free of the burden of importance. A constant pressure to never miss a step lest you fall from the ledge keeps anxiety high and breath short. But what if you did? What if you did let it go and let the orb drop from your palm? Would the ant hill as a whole be any worse off? Would the square mile of thousands of anthills even notice? In the grand scheme of things, would your mistake even shift the dirt beneath your own feet?
In a mad rush to prove that the existence we lead is worthy of having been brought forth from the primordial soup, we seek new ways to quantify the value of our days. The problem is that we can measure them against anything, an endless number of ways to win or lose a game that you’re pretty much just making up. It looks to me like most of us are choosing somehow to make ourselves losers, too.
In our grand attempts to reach a high score, we forget that we don’t even know the system of cosmic tally, and that we’re letting our squishy and limited human brains decide how the universe keeps count. When we stand next to a mountain, it forces us to notice that we might just not be so goddamn important. That maybe it’s okay just to appreciate being alive.
Mother Mountain reminds us that even she erodes, that once what seems so mighty in comparison to our own existence will also be broken down into its composite units. Something very small comes together to create something very large, and so too should we remember that we fundamentally are brought into a bigger unit through our connectivity. To only measure the value of your life in reference to what it does for yourself is the same as the rock judging its existence without ever remembering it was part of the mountain. Define fulfillment through your service to other humans. Derive your value in things larger than yourself. Take a step back and ask what you’ve done that was better for the community as a whole. Let yourself be a part of the bigger picture, not floating above it.
With love, from me to you
Note; No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.