Grandeur of Insignificance

“Is that it?” came the question from one of our four kids sitting behind my wife and me in the last hundred miles of our road trip to the Grand Canyon. “No,” I replied as we passed a relatively small crack in the Arizona desert. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

When we saw it, the massive hole was bigger than any of us imagined. And flowing through the bottom of the canyon was the surprisingly modest Colorado River. The persistence required for that stream of water to cut that ginormous canyon over that amount of time — hundreds of millions of years — was too much for me to comprehend.

Hundreds of millions of years. If you want to put your 80 or 90 or even 100 years of life on earth in perspective, stare down into a cavernous hole that was dug patiently and consistently over hundreds of millions of years. It made me feel insignificant like nothing I’d ever experienced.

It wasn’t a bad feeling of insignificance. In fact, it bolstered my confidence that in order to make any nano-impact at all on this spinning orb we call home, I had to muster all my available persistence to do the right things and live my best life — at least what’s left of it. And even if my only impact is to leave my corner of the world a slightly better place than I found it, the canyon inspired me to remain patiently and consistently focused on that simple goal.