The Places That Made Me Feel Small.

Why awe, wonder, and a little perspective can make life feel bigger. 

When was the last time you stood somewhere that made you realize just how small you are?

Not insignificant. Not unimportant. Just small.

In this episode of Notes from the Window Seat, 

I travel from the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu to the vast landscape of the Azores and the quiet of a freshly covered ski slope to explore three very different kinds of awe.

Machu Picchu made me feel small in time.

The Azores made me feel small in space.

And a quiet mountain covered in fresh snow made me feel small in the silence.

Along the way, I explore why those moments matter—and why feeling small can sometimes make life feel much bigger.

Because awe doesn't necessarily make our problems disappear.

Awe widens the frame.

And sometimes, that's exactly the perspective we need.

Sometimes the world needs to make us feel small so we can remember how big life really is.

A Question for You

When was the last time you stood somewhere that made you realize just how small you are?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

When was the last time you stood somewhere that made you realize just how small you are? Not insignificant, not unimportant, just small. I wonder if maybe that's a feeling we need more often. Welcome back to the podcast. There are certain places I've visited that I can remember almost by feeling. I remember the view, of course. I remember what was around me. I probably even have a photograph. But what has really stayed with me isn't what those places look like. It's how they changed my sense of scale. They made the world seem enormous, and me seem very, very small. I felt this standing amongst the ruins of Manchu Picchu, wondering how a civilization managed to build something so extraordinary high up in the Andes. I felt it recently in the Azores, standing on a cliff at the edge of one of the islands, staring off into the vast ocean in front of me. And I've also felt it on top of a mountain on skis, early in the morning, looking down at untouched snow, and realizing I was about to be the first person down the run. Three completely different experiences, but each one did something similar. For a few moments, everything else became quiet. The things that seemed important suddenly weren't quite so important. The world became bigger, and I became smaller. And strangely enough, I loved it. So today I've been thinking about a question. Why does feeling small sometimes make life feel bigger? That's an interesting question, because most of our lives were spent doing exactly the opposite. We're encouraged to become more, more successful, more accomplished, more influential, more productive. Build the bigger business, get the promotion, buy the bigger house, reach more people, make more money, do more, become more. And there's nothing wrong with ambition. I like accomplishing things too. I love learning. I like having something new to work towards. But I wonder if there's a point where all that striving changes the way we see the world. Without us even realizing it, we can begin putting ourselves in the center of everything. It's my schedule, my problems, my goals, my plan, my next big thing. And when you're standing in the center of the frame, everything that happens to you can start to feel enormous. One email can ruin your morning. One disagreement can occupy your thoughts for days. One delayed plan can feel like a catastrophe. One problem that can become the only thing you see. And then every once in a while the world interrupts. It gives you something so much bigger than yourself that you have no choice but to widen the frame. And that's what I call awe. And I think we need more of it. One of those places for me was Machu Picchu. There are places that make you feel small because of their physical size. And Machu Picchu did that. You're high in the Andes, surrounded by these enormous mountains. But that wasn't really what got to me. What got to me was standing there and thinking, how did they do this? How did people build something like this here? You look at the terraces, the stonework, the way everything seems to exist as part of the mountain rather than sitting on top of it. And I kept thinking about the people. Who built this? What did they see when they stood where I'm standing? What did an ordinary morning look like here? Who woke up? Who went to work? Who raised families here? What did they worry about? What made them laugh? What did they believe? What did they know that we've forgotten? And how did they possibly look at this landscape and think, we could build here? I love places that leave me with more questions than answers. Maybe that's one reason travel has always appealed to me. You can read about Machu Picchu, you can see the photographs, you can watch a documentary, you can know the history, but there's something very different about standing there. Because suddenly history isn't a chapter in a book. There were real people here. They stood on this ground, they looked at these mountains, they solved problems, they had ideas. They probably complained about work just like we do. And they lived their entire lives. And as centuries later, I arrive as a visitor and stand here looking at what's left behind. There's something humbling about that. We spend a lot of time thinking our moment in history is the moment. Our technology, our discoveries, our accomplishments, our generation. And then you stand somewhere like Machu Picchu and realize. People have been doing remarkable things for a very long time. We are not the first people to solve difficult problems. We're not the first people to create beautiful things. We are not the first people to look at something seemingly impossible and ask, but what if we could? Manchu Picchu made me feel small in time, but not insignificant, just curious, and there's a difference. Because when I feel insignificant, I want to retreat. But when I feel curious, I want to move closer. I want to know more. I want to understand. And maybe that's one of the gifts of awe. It reminds us how much we don't know. And instead of making that frightening, it makes it fascinating. I've started to think that awe and curiosity are very close cousins. Awe says, look at that. Curiosity says, I wonder. And those two things together can completely change an experience. Think about how often we walk into something already believing we understand it. We've seen the picture, we've read the description, we heard the story, we know what we're looking at. Except maybe we don't. Machu Picchu is one of the most photographed places in the world. We've all seen the classic view. But being there isn't really about confirming that the place looks like the photograph. It's about standing there long enough for new questions to appear. That's the difference between seeing something and experiencing it. And I think that applies far beyond travel. How often do we stop being curious because something has become familiar? A person, a place, our work, our community, even ourselves. We think we already know the story. And the moment we believe we know the whole story, we stop looking. Awe has a way of reopening the question. More recently, I had another one of those awe moments in the Azores. Now the Azores are a group of islands sitting out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And knowing that on a map is one thing. Feeling it is something completely different. I was standing at the edge of a cliff, and in front of me was a huge jagged cliff line. There wasn't a lot competing for attention. No city skyline, no enormous buildings, no crowd of people, just land, sky, and then the ocean. So much ocean. I remember standing there looking across this open landscape towards the water, and suddenly become very aware of where I was. I am standing on an island, one island and a small group of islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There's something about that realization that changes the way you see the horizon. Because you don't just see the distance, you feel it. There was all this space between me and whatever existed beyond that horizon. And for a few moments I didn't go anywhere. I didn't need to do anything, I just wanted to stand there. Have you ever been somewhere like that? Somewhere so large and open that you almost instinctively become quiet. That's what happened to me. Because what exactly are you going to add to a moment like that? Sometimes our instinct is to immediately reach for something. Our camera, a phone. We want to capture it, document it, share it. And I certainly understand that instinct. I am a photographer. But there are moments when the photography can wait. Because first, I want to understand what I'm feeling. And standing there in the Azores, what I felt was small. Small in space. Land beneath my feet, an ocean beyond it. A horizon beyond that, and me, one person standing at the edge of it all. My photography has probably made me more aware of this than anything. A camera gives us a frame. We decide what goes inside it and what stays outside. That's part of what makes photography interesting. But life doesn't always cooperate with the frame. Sometimes the thing you're experiencing is simply too big. You can't photograph the ocean, but you can photograph how endless it felt. You can photograph the landscape, but can you photograph the isolation? Can you photograph that moment when you suddenly realize just how far you are from everything familiar? That's much harder. And maybe not everything needs to fit inside the frame. Maybe part of experiencing awe is allowing something to be bigger than our ability to capture it. Bigger than our ability to explain it. Bigger than us. We live in a world where we have an answer from almost everything at our fingertips. You can ask your phone a question and get an answer in seconds. We can measure, we can search, we can identify, we can calculate. There's enormous value in that. But I hope we never become so good at explaining the world that we stop being amazed by it. There should still be things that make us stop and say, wow. The third place was completely different. It was a ski slope. I've always loved that moment early in the morning when you're at the top of a mountain after some fresh snow. If you're lucky, you're one of the first people up there. You get off the lift and everything looks untouched. No tracks cutting back and forth across the slope, no crowds, no noise, just fresh snow, cold airs, and the mountain view, and quiet, really, really quiet. There's a very particular kind of silence on a mountain in the snow. The snow seems to absorb everything. And if you're the first person down the run, there's this wonderful moment before you push off. You're standing at the top, looking down, fresh snow in front of you, and just for a second, I just want to stay there and look. Not because I don't want to ski, because I know the moment is temporary. Once I push off, there will be a track. Then someone else will come down and someone else. By the afternoon, that untouched slope will look completely different. But right now it's just me and the mountain. I felt small in places because of their age. I felt small because of their size. But a mountain like that makes me feel small because of the silence. There is nothing demanding my attention, nothing beeping, nothing ringing, no one asking me for anything, no list of things I need to accomplish. Just make the next turn and then the next. There's something incredibly freeing about that. Now there's another part of that mountain experience I love. My tracks aren't permanent. For a while you can look back and see exactly where you've been. You made those marks. But eventually other spheres will cross them. Snow changes, maybe even more snow falls, and eventually your tracks are gone. I think there's something worth remembering in that. We are temporary. And that can sound depressing if you say it the wrong way, but I don't think it is. Temporary doesn't mean unimportant. A sunrise is temporary. A conversation is temporary. A great meal is temporary. A trip is temporary. Some of the most meaningful things we ever experience don't last. Maybe their temporary nature is part of what makes them meaningful. Being the first person down that ski run isn't special because my tracks will be there forever. It's special because they won't. I was there, I experienced it, and then the mountain moved on. And so did I. When I think about these three places now, I realize they each gave me a different version of the same lesson. Machu Picchu made me feel small in time. The Azores made me feel small in space. And the mountain made me feel small in silence. But none of them made me feel less important. They've made me feel more awake, more curious, more present, more aware that the world is much larger than whatever happens to be occupying my thoughts at the given moment. And maybe that's what awe does. Awe widens the frame. Like as I think about what happens when we're stressed or worried, the frame gets smaller. Something happens at work, and suddenly it's all we can think about. Someone says something that bothers us, and we replay it in our head all day long. A plan falls apart and suddenly the entire week feels ruined. The problem doesn't fill the frame. The awe doesn't necessarily solve the problem. It widens the frame around it. The problem is still there, but now there's sky around it. There's ocean beyond it, and there are mountains behind it. There are hundreds of years before it, and hopefully many years after it. It returns the problem to its proper size. Sometimes we don't need the problem to become smaller. We just need the frame to become bigger. I think that's why feeling small can actually be good for us. It gives us perspective. It interrupts us. It reminds us that the world doesn't revolve around us or our plans or our problems or even our accomplishments. And there's something comforting about that. You don't have to carry the entire world. You're simply a part of it. You get your little peace, your little stretch of time, and your little place on the map. Your opportunity to leave a few tracks in the snow. What will you do with it? Maybe that's the question. Because recognizing that we're small doesn't mean our lives don't matter. I think it makes the moments we have matter more. Now obviously Machu Picchu and the Azores aren't exactly around the corner for most of us, and not everybody skis. But this isn't really an episode about creating a travel bucket list. You don't need to fly somewhere exotic to experience awe. That's important. Because awe isn't really about distance. It's about paying attention. You can find it standing beneath a tree that's been growing for a hundred years, by watching a storm roll across the horizon, or looking up at a sky filled with stars. Maybe you find it walking through an old neighborhood and wondering about the people who live there before you. Maybe listening to a piece of music that makes you stop whatever you're doing. Sometimes it's simply being outside early enough that the rest of the world hasn't become noisy yet. The remarkable is everywhere, but we become familiar with it. And familiarity has a way of making extraordinary things seem ordinary until we decide to look again. Maybe that's something we can practice, noticing what makes us stop and not immediately moving on. When something catches your attention, stay there for another minute. Look a little longer. Ask another question. Instead of simply saying that's beautiful, ask yourself, why did that affect me? Instead of immediately taking a photograph, look first. Instead of filling the silence, listen. Instead of assuming you understand what you're seeing, take a minute to wonder what happened here before I arrived? What am I looking at that I never really noticed before? How far does that ocean go? Who built this and why? Those questions don't require a passport. They require curiosity. And maybe that's how we keep this world from becoming ordinary. Before we go today, I want to leave you with this thought. Sometimes the world needs to make us feel small so we can remember how big life really is. The next time a problem feels your entire frame, look for something bigger. Look up. Find the horizon. Stand beneath an old tree. Walk somewhere quiet, or look up at the stars. Find something that was here before you arrived and will probably be here long after you're gone. Not to convince yourself that you don't matter, but to remember that this problem isn't the whole story. Remember all widens the frame. And sometimes that's all the perspective we need. So I'll leave you with a question we started with. When was the last time you stood somewhere that made you realize just how small you are? And maybe there's a second question worth asking. Where can you go this week to feel that way again? You don't need Machu Picchu, you don't need an island in the middle of the Atlantic. You don't need fresh snow on top of a mountain. You may just need to take a walk outside, to look up, stay a little longer, and pay attention. Because maybe one of the greatest gifts of the window seat is realizing that the world is much bigger than the little piece we can see from where we're sitting. And every once in a while, that's exactly what we need to remember. Until next week, grab a bite.