Why Feeling Small Feels So Good

Fifty-two people, none of them young, agreed to go for a walk once a week and photograph themselves while they were out.

Half of them were given one extra instruction. Go looking for whatever is bigger than you are. The water, the weather, the trees that were here long before the house was. Notice the things that make you feel small.

At the end, the researchers laid the photographs out in order, and the change was there to see. Week by week, the people who had gone looking for something bigger had quietly shrunk themselves — standing further back, letting the hills and the sky have the frame, until they were a small figure off in the corner of their own picture.

And their smiles had grown. Not figuratively. Measurably wider at the end than at the beginning.

The other half walked too. They walked more, in fact. Nothing in their photographs changed, and nothing in their mood changed either. Which is the most useful detail in the whole study, and the one worth carrying out of it: it was never the walking.

It was the looking. The same plain attention that makes a good moment stay with you, turned outward and aimed at something enormous.

That feeling has a name, and it's an ordinary one. Awe. It arrives when you come up against something too big to take in all at once, and your usual sense of proportion has to shuffle over to make room for it.

The people who went looking for it reported more compassion and more gratitude, and less of the low daily distress most of us treat as the cost of being alive. Other researchers have found that it leaves people feeling less hurried and more willing to give their time away. Which is a strange thing for a view to do, and it does it anyway.

Feeling small is not the same as feeling insignificant. One is a relief. The other is a wound. Almost nobody is told the difference.

That distinction is the whole thing. A view that dwarfs you isn't telling you that you don't matter. It's telling you that the week you've had is not the size of the world — that your trouble, which had swollen up to fill the entire room, is a real trouble of an ordinary size, set down in something vast and old and indifferent to it. People come back from that lighter. Not because anything was solved. Because it was put back in proportion.

And you don't need a mountain. The researchers didn't send anyone up one. The sky is free and it is doing something extraordinary most evenings. So is weather coming in across a distance. So is a tree that was already tall when you were born, or water that won't stop moving.