Small
The first glance of the great crack in the earth’s crust stole a beat from my heart and the air from my lungs.
Its size, its majesty, its colour and depth and sheer drops call out that this canyon could swallow you whole and not even notice you. If every person in the world was piled into that canyon, we wouldn’t even fill a corner. If I was to pile rocks up and up and up for my entire lifetime, I couldn’t build one of its facades. The canyon is grand. And I felt small.
It is good, sometimes, to be made to feel small.
It is good to be made to feel insignificant. It is good to look at the marvels of our planet and know that we are just one of the trillions of tiny organisms that is doing our best to survive and fight and reproduce. It puts us, and our problems, into perspective.
The human race like to think that we have it all figured out; that we have everything under control and in our grip and that we are masters of the planet. One look at that canyon, or at the towering mountains, or at the majestic oceans, will remind us that that is not true.
We are at the mercy of this wild, wonderful planet. And far from being its master, we don’t even fully understand it yet. There are depths of unexplored places, there are processes we are still learning, there are climates we are not accustomed to, there are species we are still mapping.
No man can stop the tides. No man can tell the sun to rise. No man can fill the canyon or pull down the mountains.
We are small.
But the Grand Canyon is made of rocks. Of atoms, chemically combined. layered and layered and compressed and weathered and piled soaringly high. And while it reminds us that we are small, it reminds us that there is power in togetherness. Everything big is made up of many small things.
If I can let go of my pride to remind myself that I am small, and then use that understanding to be a part of something bigger than just myself, maybe my life will build something that is as beautiful as our Grand Canyon.