There are Old Gods in the Water: On Being Significantly Smaller
The thought that kept repeating in my mind was simple, almost stupidly so: those two crocodiles are significantly bigger than the two of us.
It wasn’t a poetic thought. It wasn’t profound. It was a plain, factual, and utterly terrifying observation that had lodged itself in the most primal part of my brain.
We were in a small, flat-bottomed boat, the kind that feels reassuringly stable until it doesn’t. The air was thick and wet, smelling of mud, decaying leaves, and the electric hum of life that thrives in such places. The guide had cut the engine, and we drifted in the brown, opaque water.
And there they were.
To call them “crocodiles” feels like an understatement. They were geographical features. The first one lay on the muddy bank, a ridged, armored monster that seemed to have been carved from ancient rock and left to bake in the sun for a million years. It wasn’t just long; it was wide, a slab of prehistoric power so immense that our own bodies felt fragile and absurdly soft in comparison. Its eyes were closed, but you knew, with a certainty that chilled your bones, that it was aware of everything.
The second was in the water, only the top of its head and the long, crenelated ridge of its back visible. It looked like a series of mossy stones, until one of those stones blinked. A slow, cold, amber eye opened, regarded us with an indifference that was far more frightening than aggression, and then closed again.
These two crocodiles were significantly bigger than the two of us.
My partner and I exchanged a look. No words were necessary. We had both done the same mental calculation. The length of the boat versus the length of the beast. The speed of a panicked human versus the explosive burst of a predator that has not needed to evolve for 65 million years because it is already perfect at its job. The math was not in our favor.
In that moment, the carefully constructed scaffolding of human importance fell away. Our jobs, our worries, our plans for dinner—it all evaporated into the humid air. We were reduced to a simple biological fact: we were small, soft-bodied mammals in the territory of apex predators. We were not at the top of the food chain here. We were barely on the menu.
It’s a humbling experience, and one I think we need more often. We spend our lives in curated environments, masters of our homes and offices, kings of the thermostat and the television remote. We build cities of concrete and steel to keep the wildness at bay. We convince ourselves that we are the planet’s main characters.
But then you float past something that was here long before your species learned to walk upright, something that could end your story with a single, casual flick of its tail, and you remember. You remember that the world is ancient, powerful, and operates on rules far older than human society.
The crocodiles didn’t care about us. Our presence was as fleeting and meaningless as a dragonfly landing on their snout. And in that magnificent indifference, there was a strange kind of peace. To be insignificant is to be free from the burden of being important.
Our guide eventually started the motor, and we slowly pulled away, leaving the two giants to their sun-drenched slumber. The spell was broken, but the feeling lingered. We were quiet for a long time on the ride back.
Sometimes, the most important lessons are the simplest. We face problems that seem enormous, challenges that feel insurmountable. We see them as monsters lying in our path. But maybe the point isn’t to defeat them. Maybe the point is to drift past, acknowledge their power, and understand our own scale in the vast, wild river of life. To know, with clarity and a healthy dose of fear, that some things are just significantly bigger than we are—and that’s okay.