I was reminded yesterday of just how tiny and insignificant I am in the grand scheme of this amazing life.
Surrounded by ancient, breathtakingly beautiful trees in the Grove of the Patriarchs at Mt. Rainier National Park, I literally felt small.
Not in a bad way though.
More in a "take your breath away" kind of way.
I've been there before, but this year I was by myself.
My boys weren't with me so I didn't have to be Mom and have one eye on them to make sure they weren't wandering off the trail or touching things they weren't supposed to be touching.
This time I could just see it all and truly let the beauty of nature inspire me and put my life back in perspective again.
I took a lot of deep breaths and savored the moments, capturing those images both in literal and mental pictures.
It's a bit mind-blowing if you sit back and think about how many thousands of years of life came before us and how many more will continue after we are gone.
We are just a tiny sliver of this amazing world; our short lives barely a blip on the radar.
What's also mind-blowing is that billions of people are living their slivers of life right along-side us.
And we don't even know the vast majority of them.
They make trillions of choices every day, shaping lives, sending ripples of change across the oceans and highways. Some of them affect us, others we never even know about.
And the world goes round and round, regardless of what we do. How mind-blowing is that?
Every once in awhile it's good to reflect on how small we really are.
We need to remember that the little things in our lives that sometimes seem so big really aren't. These individual moments that cause us stress and pain are merely a sliver of the sliver of the lives we live.
Keep that in perspective.
Turn your head up to the sky every now and then and marvel at the fact that billions of other people are looking up at that very same sky and living their slivers of life in their very own way.
It's a beautiful, imperfectly perfect life we live.
Be grateful for all of the tiny, wonderful moments. And for the not so wonderful moments too.
Believe me, I know it's easy to lose sight of this when we're living the daily grind.
I'll go back home next week and have those days too where the sh*t hits the fan and I let all the little things get under my skin.
But for now, with the memories of the breathtaking views on that awe-inspiring mountain, I'm holding on to that perspective.
I'm so incredibly grateful for my tiny sliver of this amazing world.
Hope you are too.