Feeling Small In A Big World | Day 6/500

Day 6/500

Writing Prompt: What in this world makes you feel so small? What are you in awe of? 

Four years later, I can't even remember why. 

I had owned my business for an entire year, and we were finally starting to see a little money from our exhausting efforts. The holidays were coming up, and I knew I wanted to get my husband, Trevor, something special. Not clothes, because he would shrink them. Not gadgets because he would lose them. But an experience that he would always remember. 

He'd never flown before, and I don't like planes, so I knew I'd have to take one for the team for him to mark this one off his bucket list. I wanted to take him somewhere that we'd have to fly to get to. I searched the internet feverishly, sneakily, because I didn't want him to catch on to what I was doing. After an extensive search and a few book purchases, I knew what I would gift him for Christmas. 

As we sat at his aunt's house for a day of opening presents, he was not happy. We had been fighting over something, but at this time, I have no idea what. We barely spoke a word there, and I was seriously considering whether or not I even wanted to give him the book about Yosemite and the plane tickets to go along with it. Yes, that's right. I booked us a week at the Evergreen Lodge in the heart of Yosemite National Park. The pictures were absolutely stunning, and I could just imagine what it would look like first-hand. 

Reluctantly, when he finished opening the gifts from his family, I handed over mine. He stared at me, shocked. I think he got over whatever it was we were fighting about as soon as he thumbed through the pages of the book. 

"Seriously? Are we really going to Yosemite? Are these real plane tickets?" He didn't know the difference because he'd never seen real ones before. 

Five months later, in early May, we boarded a plane, and off we went to Yosemite National Park. You would have thought he was five years old, seeing the world for the first time through a little boy's eyes. He recorded videos of the takeoff, the clouds, and the landing. It wasn't too long before we were on the ground and in a rental car, heading out toward the lodge. When we got situated, we decided to explore a little more, so we hopped back in the car and made our way to the park. 

Of course, we knew it would be beautiful, but the closer we got, the grander the landscapes became. They went from hills to mountains to the most magnificent rock structures I had ever seen. 

Don't get me wrong, they were beautiful. Still, I remember telling Trevor before we turned the corner to make the descent into the park, "This is pretty, but I think I expected something different." 

It wasn't but a few seconds after speaking those words that it was like earth literally opened up. He stopped in the middle of the road, which I would not advise since we were on the top of a cliff with hundreds of cars behind us, but he couldn't help it, and I was too awestruck to yell at him. 

He pulled the car over. We got out, walked to the barrier wall, and looked out among the most beautiful shades of green, gray, and ice blue I had ever seen in my life. The rock structures were enormous. The water gushed from them like that's the exact place it was meant to be. The trees hugged rocks, the banks, the river that ran through the middle of it all. 

I couldn't get my thoughts together to form anything resembling a coherent sentence, so I stayed quiet. I remained that way until we made it to the park's base, where we left the car. We took off on a journey. I was so focused on not getting bit by a bear or snake, I didn't even look up until a slightly familiar smell caught my attention. 

It was the smell of water; fresh, misty water. My eyes moved upward, and there I was, standing in awe—complete awe of the magnificence all around me. Thousands of thoughts, thousands of emotions, all came flooding in, in a way that had me on the brink of needing to sit down. The only thing that I can specifically remember at that moment was me thinking to myself, why am I limiting myself to dreaming so small when this world is so big. 

I came back to Kentucky a slightly different person and with wildly different goals.