The following post is the original work of an outside source who is non-affiliated with Kelsey Ruffing Counseling. This post depicts the writer’s own thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

“I see this as mindfulness, encouragement to live in the present, and in general, things/what to remember when depressed or struggling to find meaning or purpose or happiness in life/feeling unfulfilled or stuck in the blues.”

Elephants are large animals—massive, really. Behemoths. Near impossible to move. Compared to them, us humans are mere ants. Much smaller, much less complex, less intricate, less unique, and not just in size. We are minute in terms of our habits and our daily lives.

We follow a certain rhythm, accomplish a certain pattern, execute a certain dance. We line ourselves up to perform our daily rituals and chores. And sometimes, we find ourselves lost and discordant, just a little bit off-beat, just a little too uniform, a little too stagnant, a little too accustomed to routine, practices, actions, and behaviors we have found redundant, monotonous, and obsolete. Then, like ants, we settle into a new order, a reformation of sorts. But even in this resettling, we find ourselves unsettled, discontent, dissonant, unfulfilled and unsatisfied.

We find ourselves questioning why we function the way we do, like ants, shuffling to the same ol’, familiar song. Just trucking by, filing our way through life, trailing through a blazing path others before us have walked, marching to the beat of another person’s drum, or so we think.

We wonder where our place is, where we’ve been and where we’re going in life, why we live the way we live; wonder if there’s more to how we live, question ourselves and society.

Questions such as Who am I? What’s my purpose? What’s the meaning of all this? arise.

We grapple with this inner void, this feeling of absence, and we struggle to answer these questions so as to mitigate the discomfort and risk posed by these questions. We shrug it off. We find solace in the thought of future miracles, large miracles, large elephants, blessings as massive as those elephants we fear.

We fret not upon these questions that alert us to our notion of insignificance, our tininess in comparison to the larger circumstances and entities of life, questions that urge our reconsideration of vastness and importance altogether.

We surmise that all will be well and these questions will cease to haunt us when we acquire these tastes of larger value or merit, as we name it. We appease our desire to feel bigger than ourselves, feel part of a greater whole by focusing on external blessings or remedies and temporary fixes with a great deal of social esteem and positive evaluation tied to them.

We say: Oh, I’ll just wait for another promotion (when we are not feeling content with our jobs but are not brave enough to leave them, thinking better/higher/improved pay will change our attitude to it). Or, oh, I’ll be satisfied when I win the lottery (when unsatisfied with our current finances or the amount of money in our bank accounts, perhaps even our choice of employment). Or, oh, when I finish this degree and get a job, I’ll finally be happy (when unsure about our career path or future plans/prospects in life).

But it’s never enough. We’re never satisfied. The elephant still fills up our vision, still obscures our landscape. We wait for it to ambush us. We anticipate the larger, monstrous beast standing in our way, blocking us from our blessings.

If we were only larger instead of infinitesimally smaller, we could outlast the beast, we could conquer the beast, we could outmaneuver the beast, we could find a way to achieve everything the beast prevents us from grasping because it is mightier and greater than us.

We think of ways to defeat, pulverize, or escape from the beast. Lure the beast. Make smaller the beast, and make taller ourselves.

We don’t think of a way to honor the existence of both the beast and ourselves. We don’t feel as though we can coexist.

We feel ashamed of all the ways we don’t measure up to the larger beasts of the world; how much smaller, tinier, weaker, less courageous, less important we are.

We imagine ways to make ourselves taller, more massive, stronger, mightier. We conceive of methods that help us avoid or minimize the prospect of encumbering these large beasts, these obstacles to our own ability to thrive, obtain our goals and successes, and sustain ourselves. We don’t think of how nature needs both the ant and the elephant to be complete. And there is no need to compete with the existence of elephants.

It’s so easy to feel small in life, to feel insignificant, to feel less than when compared to the enormous forces that shape our lives, the existence of realities and entities much larger, considerably taller than us—elephants blocking our path.

But when we feel small and invalid or inferior, it is important to fall back on our current situation and recognize all of the small miracles that envelop our lives.

Every day we wake up, every day we get out of bed and get ready for the day is a small miracle. Every moment we fall asleep and rest and recover from the day is a miracle. Every candle we light on a birthday is a miracle. Every body we bury, every body we mark with a grave is a small miracle—the fact that we are able to give a name and a tombstone to a person, able to identify, recognize, celebrate, and give a proper burial or end-of-life ceremony to a face, an entity, able to carve out space for the fallen to occupy and be enshrined in memorial, able to pay homage to the lives of the deceased. In life and death. In eulogy and memoriam.

Every day we read a novel we love, paint, mock or make fun of Piers Morgan, have a spa day and practice self-care, write a novel, leave a sticky note for our best friend, splurge on a treat just for the sake of it, go to the movie theater and watch a fiercely anticipated movie, cry and weep at an old classic, thumb through a photo book, put lights up on a Christmas tree, gather around the table on a holiday, open or wrap presents on Christmas Day, play jingles, feed ourselves and the poor, text our partner black heart emojis, sleep under warm blankets in a furnaced house with a roof over our heads, laugh with our friends, take a walk in the park, pet a puppy, munch on some chocolate or some other candy bar or sweet goodie, bake some delightful chocolate chip and sugar cookies, watch our favorite talk show, get festive with holiday decorations and go shopping for ugly Christmas sweaters, yell at our TV screens grimacing at the latest sports game or an angsty soap opera, cover our faces in horror, sighing loudly, agonizing over the latest cliffhanger or plot-twist in bestseller.

- Nnekakwo Adibe