A Matter of Scale

// Cordillera Huayhuash, Peru //

Whenever I tell my friends that I’m planning another trip, their remarks are usually something like, “Another hike!?” “Andrew, you’re ALWAYS hiking!” or “Do you ever just relax?” And I laugh, because it’s true, my vacations skew adventurous rather than restful. But there is something addicting about going somewhere that makes me feel physically small.

In ordinary life, I often feel enormous. The everyday rhythm is all-consuming, and by its nature, it puts me at the center. My schedule, to-do lists, ambitions, anxieties, etc., all seem to orbit around me nonstop. It becomes easy to believe in the illusion that I am in control, the master and commander of my fate, so to speak.

But a big trek has a way of popping that illusion. So of course I had my eye on the Cordillera Huayhuash in Peru for years. The soaring peaks and lakes nestled beneath them captured my imagination, and I was drawn to the scale of it all. I imagined a tent looking absurdly tiny against some of the tallest mountains in the world. I envisioned a hiker ahead of me slowly disappearing into the landscape. Myself, lost somewhere in the middle of it all. And over eight days walking through the Huayhuash, that is exactly how I felt.

There is something initially intimidating about that kind of smallness. Out there, it becomes obvious that I don’t command the place. I would spend hours climbing toward a high mountain pass, only to reach the top just as the sky opened up and started hailing—a phenomenon that somehow managed to time itself almost perfectly with every pass I crossed. The mountains didn’t particularly care that I had finally made it. The weather didn’t consult my itinerary. I was sleeping in a tent beneath enormous walls of rock and ice that had been there long before me and will remain long after I’m gone. I was at the mercy of something much larger than myself.

But somewhere along the trail, the feeling of being at nature’s mercy became comforting. I didn’t have to be enormous, and I didn’t have to be in control. For eight days, much of what ordinarily occupied my mind was replaced by the simple meditation of putting one foot in front of another. My world became simultaneously much bigger and much smaller. Bigger because my perspective zoomed outward, beyond the little universe I normally occupy. Smaller because the things that demanded my attention became wonderfully immediate. Where is the trail? How much farther to camp? Is that storm moving toward me? When can I take off my pack?

There is a difference, I think, between feeling insignificant and feeling small. Insignificance is about worth, while smallness is about scale.

And it’s so refreshing to remember my tiny scale. My worries and plans occupy only a tiny pocket of something incomprehensibly large. But strangely, I don’t find that realization nihilistic. I may occupy only a tiny pocket of this enormous world, but it is still mine to inhabit. So what kind of existence do I want to carve out within it? What deserves the limited time and attention I have here?

Maybe that is why, as the world around me gets bigger, the smallest things begin to feel more significant.

Warm socks at the end of a cold day. A cup of coffee in the morning. The relief of dropping my pack onto the ground. The first bit of sunlight reaching camp. When so much of ordinary life falls away, these tiny pleasures somehow become enough.

There’s something paradoxical about it: the bigger the world becomes, the more I notice its smallest pleasures.

Eventually, of course, I return home. My world begins to shrink around me again, and I begin to grow within it. My schedule returns. My to-do lists refill. An unanswered email starts to feel urgent. Being ten minutes late feels consequential. I get frustrated sitting in traffic, replay an awkward conversation longer than it deserves, or let a small change of plans derail my mood. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, these little things expand until they once again occupy far more of my field of vision than they probably should.

But each time I return from a trek, I think I bring a little of that scale home with me. Every so often, I can catch myself and zoom back out. Something that once might have occupied my entire field of vision becomes one small thing happening in one small day of one small life.

And maybe that is what keeps drawing me back to the mountains. It feels good to remember how small I am.