I love feeling small.

I love New York because it makes me feel small and unnoticed. At any given moment, I’m not the only one going through it or having a rough day. There’s over 8 million people here. And over 15 million in Bangalore. All of us hustling, rat-racing and chasing.

I love being in nature because of this reason, too. The sand and the ocean make me feel trivial, like I am a speck of dust in their expansive worlds. The mountains and trees have been here for years before me and will be for years after.

It’s a feeling I don’t think many people enjoy. Maybe because it means confronting the insignificance of your existence, and well, that’s a harsh reality. It means realizing that we’re pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things: the clouds will keep moving and the earth will keep turning. The waves don’t know nor care how much we’ve checked off our to-do lists or whether we met our water intake goal for the day.

It’s a scary thought to have: that I’m just a tiny little speck across both space and time, in this big billion-year-old blue machine. At the same time, it’s an extremely liberating thought. It puts things into perspective, it makes me see beyond just myself, it makes me feel one with my surroundings. It reminds me that there are always bigger fish to fry.¹

The truth is, lately I have been having these moments where I feel very un-small. I’ve noticed that at work and in my creative practice, I want to take ownership over the things I have said and done. Not only have I been feeling un-small internally, I’ve also been making everything around me about me. I spin every conversation to be about me or my experiences.

“That idea was mine, I’m the one who did all of that!”

I find myself craving a certain kind of external validation, like,

“look, Tanvi, I washed the dishes today!”

It’s an uncomfortable duality to hold in my being – there’s this big part of me that wants to feel small and there’s this small part of me that wants to feel big. I want to feel noticed, important and significant.

I think about The Self a lot. What it means to be a person, what it means to be me, and what it means to just.. be. But lately, the more I think about My Self, the more I feel self-ish. As much as I’d like for my ego to be dead, it isn’t.

It’s so easy to get swept up in the feeling of big-ness. It’s so easy to make things about me, or put myself into every situation. It’s easy to immerse one’s self in one’s self.

I’m writing this post to remind myself of something that I seem to have forgotten lately: I still love to feel small. No matter how daunting, hard or naive it may seem to us, I want to be and feel small again.

Sure, the waves don’t care how much I got done yesterday or how much I have left to do on my list; but they’re here, now, and I don’t want to miss them. I want to feel small so I can be more present. A better observer. A better listener. To me, feeling small means making space appreciate the ideas that both are and aren’t mine. To take in more.

I want to feel small, so I can live big.

1. Is there a vegan version of this idiom? ↩︎