A Trilogy on Size. Part 1: Hugeness.

When I was young (and I mean really young), I used to play a game with my brother based on the story of Jonah. I think I was around 4 or 5 years old, and I wonder if my brother even remembers playing it with me. The game functioned very similarly to tag. The person who was the whale (or big fish, if you prefer) was "it" and, if he tagged you, you had to go hide under a bed and pretend like you were eaten. 

This is the earliest memory I have of being afraid of something huge. 

Hugeness and a fear of hugeness are difficult sentiments for me to explain because fear has become something to be explained away rationally. "You were just scared of the whale (or big fish) because you were worried about it hurting you," would be the typical psychologist response to it. But that wasn't it. The whale (or big fish) was simply huge, and I did not want to be close to it.

I felt something similar when I went whale watching in Hawaii. When the whales were far away, I thought they were pretty cool, but when we got into the water and they surrounded our boat, I just wanted to be back on dry land.

In this way, I can understand Captain Ahab.

Pause for a moment and see if you know what I'm talking about. Remember what it was like to be afraid of something big and simply not wanting to be near it. Don't try to explain why you don't want to be near it, because that's not the point. The point is that it is gigantic, and kind of grotesque for being gigantic.

This wariness of hugeness is probably the reason why, as a kid, it was impossible for me to be "friends" with teachers, or even kids much older than me. Sure, I wanted the teacher around if I was being bullied or needed help; they were our giant protectors. But when it came time for me to choose what I wanted to do, I never chose to be around them more than I had to be.

"But that's because they did not want to play the games you wanted to. Grown-ups just didn't get it." Does anybody still think this? It's not like my childish games were so sophisticated that adults didn't get them; they were too boring for them to be interested in them. I didn't want them around because they were grown-ups and I was a kid.

They were too big for my games. 

Do you remember what it was like for you to get lost in the world of grown ups? Looking back, I wonder how that even happened to me. It seems unfeasible to me that I ever managed to get lost in Target or Disneyland, but, when I was a kid, these places were too big. They seemed to have some unspeakable rules or patterns that the grown-ups around me could follow, but were unknowable to me.

And when I got lost, what could I do? I was smart enough to know that not all grown-ups were good people, but I had no way of telling the good grown-ups from the bad. These signs that were clear to the giants around me, but I was too small to notice them. All I could do was hide. Somewhere small. I'd go into the world within the shirt hangers where no grown-up could go. In this world, this small world, I could feel comfortable even though I was lost. 

There were no giants there, just me in my little world.

Seeing something big is scary. It should be. Think of the phrase "larger than life". Isn't that horrible? Something so big that it is more looming than life itself. It's an assault on your senses; namely, there is too much for you to sense. You can become overwhelmed by how much you can focus on. You know that you have to be able to focus on the whole thing at once to understand it, but you cannot do that, yet you keep trying. 

"It's a Hell of a thing."

I think why God does not reveal Himself, in all His glory, to the world is because we cannot handle it.

Satan, however, is willing to do that. I just finished reading Inferno and the picture of Satan and the Titans in Hell is fresh in my mind. I'll be honest, it was emotionally hard for me to put myself in Dante's shoes and stand gaping at these terrors. How awful it was to climb the flank of Satan. What do you do with that, except want to run away? How can you look at something huge and not be afraid?

This isn't meant to put down tall or burly people, because they really aren't the kind of big I'm talking about. As a person of average height, I don't get weirded out by my 6 ft, 9 in tall friends. I mean it more something like this.

As an adult, I worked with kids for a while, but before that, as a child, I was a frequent member of our school's daycare. Teachers and daycare workers were always scary. As I grew up, they stopped being scary. I've been afraid of people who, now, I can make fun of. The 5 ft, 90 lb was a terror to me as a kid, but something small and delicate to me as a man. 

When I was a child, what scared me was that she was a grown-up, and when I became a grown-up, she stopped scaring me.

But when I saw her as a child, she was huge. She was a giant. A titan. An assault on my senses. Too much to take in.

This is the first blog in a new trilogy, and all I'm aiming to do with this first part is to point out this feeling. I want you to remember what it was like to be around something huge. The feeling of wanting to run away. How did you react to the fact that their are huge things in the world? What has it done to you? How did it change you?

And what do you do when you become the giant?