Indifferent and Beautiful

Nature does not care about you. That is the first thing the wilderness teaches, and it is the most important.

She moves with a steady, unmatched consistency that has nothing to do with your opinions, your feelings, or your plans. She pays no attention to your one small life. She has witnessed billions before you and will witness infinite after, and you register to her as almost nothing at all. Her ocean will swallow you in a blink. Her mountains will bury you just as fast — without notice, without malice, without so much as a pause.

Stand somewhere remote enough and you feel it land in your chest. The sheer scale of it. The indifference of it. You are a speck in front of something so vast and so old that your entire existence is a rounding error, and it does not know your name.

In the same instant you realize a simple truth.

It does not crush you. It takes your breath away.

You are intimidated and in awe within the same beat of your small heart — and those are not two feelings fighting each other. They are one feeling. The thing that makes you feel insignificant is the exact same thing that makes you feel the beauty of being here at all. You are nothing against that vastness, and you get to stand inside it, conscious, breathing, aware enough to be moved by it. Both are true at once.

Most live their entire lives at the size of their own concerns — their grievances, their status, the small weather of their own ego — and mistake that for the size of the world. The wilderness cures it in a single afternoon. It shows you your true proportion, and the strange gift of that is not despair. It is relief. Most of what you carry was never as big as you thought. You were just standing too close to it to see how small it was against the mountains.

Stand where the land does not care whether you live, and feel how little you matter, and how astonishing it is that you are here to not matter at all.

Then carry that proportion back with you. Move through your days humbled by what dwarfs you and grateful for the brief, unlikely miracle of getting to move through them at all.

You are a speck.

And the speck gets to see all of this.