My weekday morning book is entitled, “Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder and Things That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark by Julia Baird. It’s a combination of memoir and scientific findings, and reminds me a bit of Katherine May’s “Wintering”, which I love. I find myself highlighting occasional phrases or passages. Recently, I was struck by these lines, and jotted them down in my notebook:
“We spend a lot of time in life trying to make ourselves feel bigger–to project ourselves, occupy space, command attention, demand respect–so much so that we seem to have forgotten how comforting it can be to feel small and experience something greater than ourselves, something unfathomable, unconquerable and mysterious.”

I turned these words over and over in my mind. So often we think of being small in a negative sense. As being disempowered or vulnerable. To make someone feel small is to belittle or demean them. The idea that there is a flip side to this, that such a feeling might be positive, was intriguing to me.

Julia Baird goes on to write, “This sense of smallness seems to be a key to a true experience of awe.” She writes about how architects designed vast interiors in cathedrals to inspire “a sense of smallness, and consequently, awe.” She notes that researchers have tracked people’s reported experiences with awe and found that “on average, they encountered something that inspired awe every three days, such as ‘music played on a street corner at 2 am, individuals standing up to injustice, or autumnal leaves cascading from trees.'”

I mixed these ideas in my mind: feeling small, feeling awe.

Then, I went to the beach:

There is assuredly some comfort and peace to be found in feeling small.