One of the first essays I ever posted was about perspective. Actually, I have posted several essays on the topic, but the first one comes to mind predominantly because of my stance. In the essay titled It doesn’t really matter, but it kinda really does, I was talking about the liberating feeling brought forward by the magic and majesty of the natural world. This feeling was about zooming out from my life. At the time, I was made too large by the human-sized world. 

In that essay, I did my best to exemplify the medicine I found in being among that which has preceded me and will likely surpass me. I was among trees, and I was overcome by the height of the canopy. It felt good, at the time, to feel rooted in my impermanence. It felt good to embody the cosmic (in)significance of our very brief lives.

Now, the reason I’m thinking of this one is because, like all things, there is another angle I can take and therefore another essay I can write. I am not always in need of the zoom out, and feeling small in a grandiose universe isn’t always a nice feeling. Thanks to the dynamism and inconsistency of feeling and perspective, I am here to talk about the other side of all of this, where instead of zooming out, we zoom in. 

Believe it or not, feeling small is not always good. We can feel out of control, insignificant, nihilistic. When we feel small in the grand scheme, we are pulled into the vortex of a hyper-distant perspective. We are viewing our lives through the looking glass; we’re tearing it apart from a level from which we do not live.

What I mean by this is that we do not live our lives in the summary stage, though recognizing larger themes in our lives can often be fruitful. We do not experience in this way; we contextualize. Not only do we not actively experience at this distance, but because we cannot experience here, we also do not have the potential to be present. The grand scheme involves all times; it involves all moments and iterations of us. But you are not always there and here, or at least the version of you reading this is not. 

So when I woke up a few days ago and the world and all its iterations of past, present, and future became too heavy to carry, it became time to shrink the world. The zoom out was too much, too overstimulating, too meaningless. I was drowning in the widened perspective of wasted time, or whatever it was I was telling myself about. Time to zoom in, it’s time to get closer.

So what does it mean to shrink the world? Well, it is the practice of momentary attention to the small things. We direct our attention, for brief pockets of time, to what is around us. We practice mindfulness. We play with our immediate realities. 

This also means taking stock of the ways we can engage close up. We look to ants, blades of grass, the texture of towels or blankets or your skin. Come here, we tell ourselves. Be closer to the world. 

Make a cup of tea, feel its warmth. Run our hands under water. Take a shower. We have control in these little ways. We must exercise our will through smallness regularly, as often as we can. Remember how powerful we can be? We are gifted with this option, even if our wider experiences seem powerless. What can we do right now? How large can we be?

So we shrink the world, we temporarily, through necessity, become large in our pursuits of cultivating presence. We find a door out of the hyper-distant vortex. We walk through it. 

There is a reason we are often called to stop and smell the roses, and it is because pleasure is found not only in the pause but in the process of using our agency to interrupt our lives for this small yet powerful joy. It is not the flowers themselves, but it is the power to stop that turns the sweet smell of flowers into a special kind of reward. The act of zooming in is what reminds us of the power of perspective and how significant we can be when we get closer to our lives.

The world is often too large, and the cosmos is even larger. The problems of our experiences, our consciousness, our long but incredibly brief lives are overwhelming, exhausting. But the here and now is manageable.

The world, in this small sphere, I can hold. This cup of coffee, this blanket, I can hold. I’ll be here for a while, as long as I need to. I’ll be watching the bees on the flowers and feeling the rain when it falls. I’ll be here for a while, in my softened shrunken world.