“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” -Carl Sagan

Feeling small is an incredible blessing.

Recently I had the overwhelming joy of experiencing this on one of the largest scales imaginable with a short trip to the Grand Canyon. It was on this too-short voyage that I was humbled in a way that I don’t think I have ever experienced before.

So much of our society is pounding us relentlessly to be obscenely large in our self obsession, to occupy time and space in the biggest ways imaginable. That identity is found in grandeur of oneself.

But standing in the Grand Canyon, looking over the entirety of earth’s history, you learn just the opposite. Identity is found when you feel incredibly small. Identity is found in the humility that we are just an infinitely minute part of the universe. Identify is found when you put it all in perspective.

This is not to be mistaken for insignificance. Just the opposite. This identity is found when you recognize that you were created as part of the infinitely long, magically complex human story for a very specific reason.

Like strokes in a Monet. We are not meant to be large, we are not meant to be enough all on our own. We are meant to be intertwined, blended, saturated, and morphed. We are not meant to be seen as a stroke, we are meant to be viewed as a work of art. We are meant to be seen from a step back, meant to be seen from a place of perspective. The beauty of our kind is we we have a boundlessly talented artist putting each of us exactly where we are supposed to be. An artist whose masterpiece can only work when all of us realize our destiny.

A destiny to be small, yes, but more than that a destiny to be part of a masterpiece.