When you look down, you see all the small things.
And there’s captivating beauty in the minutia.
There’s comfort, too, in that feeling of being so much bigger than everything underneath your feet.
You’re walking along the beach when some delicate detail arrests your attention and snags it. Maybe it’s the pearly underbelly of a seashell. Or a flash of blue among the neutrals of the sand.
You crouch down and find a perfectly smooth piece of sea glass. Take it in your hand. Turn it over. Rub your thumb against it to remove the traces of grit and feel for yourself that it is indeed as smooth as it looks.
Your body is bent over, crouched low. Rounded. As your thoughts circle around the precious beauty of that detail.
Then, as you admire your treasure, your gaze rests on the grains of sand stuck to your thumb. Micro-fragments of mighty cliffs or undersea mountains from distant millennia. Made tiny by time and the perpetual battering of the sea.
And you remember that your own body is made of even tinier bits. Cells and nerves and organisms that no human eyes could ever make out by themselves. Your own self is the sum of billions of microscopic miracles – tinier even than these mountains turned into sand.
You’re colossal. You’re gargantuan. You’re mighty.
But then a seagull screams overhead.
You stand up, and you’re faced with the vastness of it all. The endless sky. The sea, with its horizon that takes you over the edge and around the world on a dizzying flash voyage in your head.
It takes your breath away – the hugeness of it all and your relative puniness. You can touch none of it. Feel none of it. Only admire from afar.
When you look down, you see all the small things.
But when you look up, you’re just a small thing too.
And somewhere between those two polar opposites, lies peace and potential and humanity.
