Small

“Feeling small in the best way.”

That’s the line I jotted down in the notes app on my phone from the passenger seat of my car, while my husband drove, on a recent trip to visit my parents. A Friday afternoon in late February where the light was just right and the trees were still bare. There was just enough sun to make you feel awake and just enough highway views to make you feel alive.

There is a certain type of feeling that happens only in the car, and only on a long drive. Maybe it comes from seeing things you don’t see in your everyday life - more sky, more clouds, more mountains, more wild animals (a heron, a hawk, and a bunch of turkeys on this particular drive).

It’s probable that, like most experiences in life, it depends also on the mood and outlook of the observer. The things that have happened in your day, week, month. Where you are headed and why.

We were driving a route that I’ve driven hundreds of times - every twist and turn is familiar. I know the names of the towns and the order we pass them in, and I have a few favorite vistas along the way. On this particular day, though, I was seeing them differently. There was a realization of how much had changed internally over time, and how the landscape had remained almost exactly the same.

Every time I take this particular drive, I’m a slightly different person, and yet that’s really only noticeable to me. I am huge and important inside this world of my car hurtling down the highway at seventy miles an hour, and yet invisible to everyone who passes by in their own car-contained world.

In this instance I was more aware than usual of how long change takes outside my own tiny world, how expansive the landscape we were passing was, and how unfazed it all is, both us and the outside world, by all the cars containing universes of their own.

Our devices also seem to contain small worlds of their own, narrowing our focus down to just a few inches. There are many varieties of a narrow focus - maybe we’re paying attention to someone talking, or we’re doing deep work on a meaningful project. But we can also have narrow focus where we lose track of ourselves, most often when we engage with media.

As we drove, I kept thinking about the different ways we can feel small. Other people can make us feel small, and circumstances can as well. To some extent, the responsibility to take up space falls squarely on our shoulders, but it’s all too easy to get lost in a sea of observation looking at the chaos of the world and the curated beauty and success of friends and strangers.

It’s easy to get lost in external beauty that doesn’t seem to belong to us, and it happens to all of us even though we know that media and advertising is curated to do exactly that. We end up feeling small and insignificant, out of reach from this elusive something that we chase.

When I was younger it was so easy to get lost in random things - to take something small and give it so much attention that it becomes more important than everything else around it. I’m not sure if I lost that way of looking at the world just from aging and gaining responsibilities or if our media culture stole it away. I suspect it’s a little bit of both.

When we get lost in something that catches our eye or attention and we allow that thing to take over our view, it grows in size as we recede. We become small, but not in an insignificant way.

It’s not just about managing our attention, but developing the senses that may have become weakened like gratitude, wonder, and curiosity. These are things that we value and teach to children as pivotal to growing up, and yet when life gets busy we lose track of them first.

When was the last time you let yourself get lost? By letting curiosities grow large we can open up so much space in our minds. It sounds like daydreaming, but it’s much more concrete than that. It’s allowing ourselves to remember there are cars upon cars and worlds upon worlds outside the security of our singular device or universe. It’s learning that building wonder into small things allows us to glimpse those other worlds and expands our days, relationships, and lives.