Happily Insignificant
Throughout our lives, both personal and professional, we establish reputations, form expectations, and gain responsibilities; if we’re not careful this can lead us to mistaking busyness for purpose. If we’re fortunate enough to recognize this, hitting the pause button on life, even if only for a brief moment, can allow us to reset our perspectives. Sometimes these opportunities happen to us, and sometimes we need to put ourselves in places or situations where we’re left with a healthy sense of insignificance.
For me, I’ve experienced these moments in wildly different but equally humbling environments. I’ve felt this sense of incredible smallness wearing a g-suit and helmet while strapped into the cockpit of a Navy jet, and recently I’ve felt it just as acutely wearing running shoes in the middle of nowhere.
Last year, at 30,000 feet on an ink-black night, sitting in the relative calm and quiet of a $75 million jet, I looked to my left across the North Arabian Sea and saw a shooting star streak from one side of the sky to the other. It was a real Carl Sagan kind of moment. The scale of it came into as clear of focus as something as immeasurable as the nights sky can. Sitting in this cockpit, with thousands of hours of experience and training, a mountain of responsibility, live weapons hanging under the wing, and the ability to make this amazing machine respond to my will with the mere flick of my wrist…even with all that, I felt very small. Despite my rank and my qualifications, which suggested some level of importance, I felt very unimportant, and it was good.
This wasn’t some hyper-emotional or soul-shaking spiritual moment; in fact, this moment lasted about as long as it took that star to streak across the sky, but it spurred a thought I’ve held onto for quite a while. There are no shortage of books, podcasts, and self-help gurus who’d have us believe feelings of insignificance are detrimental to our mental and physical well-being. We’re told we’re special, powerful, and important. We’re told the thousands of micro decisions and actions we take each day are immensely consequential. We (myself included) have come to believe we are truly masters of our environments. That’s not a totally unfair conclusion. When you step back and consider the power and capability the average American carries just in their cell phone it’s hard not to stand in awe of all we’re capable of. It becomes pretty easy to start seeing ourselves as important. For some, it can become quite intoxicating.
This past weekend I traveled to Moab, Utah to participate in an ultramarathon. The ‘race’ I ran Saturday was a 50k (30ish miles). That distance is considered an entry-level ultra, a gateway drug of sorts for the really long stuff. It’d been five years since I’d run far, and that distance seemed like a reasonable way to put a toe back in the water. The stunning course wanders through the Dead Horse State Park just north of Moab. I ran the first ten miles in a very smooth and controlled fashion. I could run hard when I wanted to, I could ease off when I needed to, and I was steadily passing fellow runners. I was wearing a fancy watch, expensive shoes, and a neat little vest with food stuffs more suited for astronauts than me. I was in control! I was doing something significant — dammit. Then I turned a corner on the trail and stopped dead in my tracks. Every sense of importance and significance evaporated:
I stood there for a moment or three and just stared, immediately taken back to the cockpit on that dark night. I realized over the last year I’d forgot the healthy humility that comes from recognizing our own smallness. I’ve been scratching and clawing to find a salve for the scab left when I took my flight suit off for the last time — to find something “big” to do with this next chapter of my life. Standing on the edge of this cliff, with another twenty miles to run, thinking about how I’d let that night’s lesson escape me, I couldn’t help but wonder.
Why do we feel such an overpowering need to do big things? Why do we feel so compelled to be deemed important? What justifies our insatiable desire for more? How easy it is for us to get caught up in our day-to-day grinds, mistaking busyness for purpose. Why are we so afraid of being reminded of our frailty and smallness? Regrettably, I don’t have much in the way of an answer to these questions. What I do have is a strong sense that most of us think entirely too much of ourselves, too many of us believe the narratives we write about ourselves on social media, and not enough of us take the time to stop and appreciate the things we drive (and fly) past every day.
Do we need to drive off into the desert and run dumb distances to remedy this? Of course not. (However, if you choose to do that, I’d strongly encourage a more robust training plan than I followed)… No, I think if each of us could simply find a few things each day that make us marvel, we’d be in a much healthier place. I think if more of us picked our heads up and noticed this star or that canyon it might well provide the perspective that refocuses our sense of importance and significance.
Jack
