Essay: Oh, the places you’ll feel small

We spend so much of life trying not to feel small.

We chase significance, importance, and a sense of centrality. Like if we can just take up enough space, we might outrun the fact that, in the grand scheme of things, we are microscopic.

But what if feeling small isn’t something to resist? What if it’s something to seek out?

Because the truth is, the moments that have truly moved me (the ones that have stopped me in my tracks and rearranged my perspective) are the ones that have made me feel spectacularly, breathtakingly, insignificantly small.

Not in a way that made me feel like less, but in a way that made me feel part of something bigger.

So, here’s to a few places that have put me in my place. Rightfully.

Yosemite is one of those places that doesn’t just make you feel small, but it insists on it. Standing beneath granite cliffs (I lichen them a lot), dwarfed by towering sequoias, you realise how much of your life exists inside a bubble of self-importance. And then, suddenly, that bubble pops.

John Muir, whose words immortalised this place, once wrote:

“We are in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun, –a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal.”

And standing there, next to the actual John Muir Tree (pictured—see if you can spot my friend, Trevor), I knew exactly what he meant. I was not separate from this place; I was of it. My worries, my ambitions, my day-to-day anxieties (of which there were many in 2016) – all of them felt appropriately, refreshingly tiny. Yosemite has no interest in the troubles of my life. It is utterly and profoundly indifferent to me (thank you, Cheryl Strayed, for putting that into words). And yet, in that indifference, there was something oddly comforting.

Because in a place so vast and so eternal, what remains is what truly matters. The wonder we allow ourselves to feel. The reminder that we are part of something so much bigger than ourselves.

For just a moment, I did feel immortal.

Day two of an epic California road trip (I will never regret jumping into a car with 3 complete strangers) was spent winding our way down Highway 1.

I saw sea otters and California condors. I made friends with strangers, took their photos, and, for a moment, became part of their stories. My new friends and I got weird in the Redwoods. We blasted Death Cab for Cutie as we crossed the Bixby Canyon Bridge because, let’s be honest, there was no other way to do it.

It was one of those days where the world and its possibilities felt impossibly big, yet somehow, I felt more present in it than ever. Maybe it was the realisation that, in the grand scheme of things, we are all just passing through. We’re temporary travellers on a speck of dust floating through space (I just gave myself chills).

But isn’t that the magic of it? That the bigness of the world isn’t there to diminish us but to remind us how much there is to see, to feel, and to be part of. The more I let go of needing to feel important, the more I felt connected. To the world, to my friends, to this beautiful (fleeting) moment in time.

It really was a beautiful day.

“And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there. Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the other. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.” — Ezra Pound

I had never been in a city of that size before. The first time I stepped onto a Manhattan sidewalk, it felt like stepping onto a moving treadmill that had no interest in slowing down for me.

But the thing about New York is that it doesn’t shrink you. It absorbs you. You are not separate from the chaos but a part of it.

The neon lights don’t shine for you, but you get to stand beneath them. The city doesn’t care who you are, but if you let it, it will pull you into its current and make you feel like you belong to something wild, electric, and utterly unstoppable.

I arrived in Tasmania at the end of one of the most tumultuous years of my entire life. My head was loud, my heart was tired, and I carried the weight of a year I wasn’t sure I’d make it through.

Walking down Mount Wellington in the freezing mist felt like stepping into a fresh future. One I hadn’t planned but one I desperately needed. The silence up there wasn’t empty. It was thick, heavy, and full of knowing. It was the kind of silence that doesn’t just quiet your thoughts but rewrites them.

I had to wear my sweatpants as a scarf because, like a fool, I hadn’t packed for cold weather (who brings a scarf to Australia in December?). But in that moment, shivering and laughing with one of my best friends (the same bestie who had walked beside me through all the highs and lows since high school), I realised something simple: we survive things.

We go through the worst, and then, one day, we find ourselves somewhere new, wrapped in makeshift scarves, breathing in the kind of cold, clean air that feels like a second chance.

Even our darkest times are just a momentary blip. And somehow, that makes them easier to bear.

Somewhere between the Parisian rooftops and the golden fields of Provence, I was reminded of another simple thing: no matter where I go or how much I change, I will always be someone’s daughter.

Travelling with my parents as an adult was a quiet revelation. As a teenager, I had been too busy rolling my eyes at their quirks to realise how objectively cool they actually were. But here we were, years later, laughing at things that would have once embarrassed me beyond measure. I saw them not just as parents but as people. Hilarious, wonderfully weird, and absolutely, unequivocally mine.

I think that’s what made me feel small. It wasn’t being in the shadow of history or under the weight of time but in the realisation that love, unconditional love, is so much bigger than we ever give it credit for. That no matter how far we go, we are still tethered to the people who shaped us.

I’ll forever regret not appreciating them sooner. But if feeling small in the presence of love means I get to spend the rest of my life making up for lost time, then I’ll take it. Again and again.

Then there are moments in life that shrink you. Moments so full, so enormous, that your body simply isn’t built to contain them. And so, they spill over. Into laughter, into tears, into the kind of love that makes you realise just how small you are in comparison.

Eloping in Ireland was one of those moments.

A freezing beach on a tiny island. Just us and nine of our closest friends (and two little ones who didn’t quite grasp the gravity of the occasion but made it all the better). And though it was our day, it wasn’t just about us. It was about the people who had carried us here, who had held us up through every storm, and who would still be there, even then, to walk us home.

And there were tears. A lot of them. (I now know my tear glands are far too small for feelings this big.)

If Yosemite made me feel immortal and New York made me feel absorbed, then Ireland made me feel held. By the people I love and by the sheer enormity of what it means to be known.

And if that’s what it means to feel small, then I hope to feel small forever.

There have been many other places and moments that have made me feel spectacularly small. If I listed them all, we’d be here all day. But here’s what I know for sure:

We spend so much of life trying to feel big, but the moments that truly matter are the ones that remind us how small we are. Not in a way that diminishes us, but in a way that expands us.

Because to feel small is to stand before something boundless and know you are part of it. It is to witness a love so immense it shrinks you. It is to walk through history and realise how many lives have been lived before yours. It is to stand on a mountaintop, in a city, on a shoreline and know (deep in your bones) that the world is impossibly large and your time here is impossibly brief.

And what a privilege that is.

The odds of us existing at all (of being here, in this time, in these bodies, with these people) are so astronomically bizarre that we might as well stop fighting it. We might as well embrace the wonder of it all.

We are small.

And that, I think, is just effing spectacular.