I am not someone who is comfortable with smallness. My professional life has been oriented, since I was twenty-two, toward becoming larger — more capable, more responsible, more visible, more certain about more things. Bwindi Forest made me feel small in approximately forty-five minutes and I have been trying, with variable success, to hold onto that feeling ever since. This is an account of how the forest did it and why it was the best thing that happened to me that year.
What I Mean by Smallness
I do not mean diminishment. I do not mean the smallness of being overlooked or underestimated or made to feel insufficient. I mean the smallness that comes from encountering something so much larger, older, and more complex than you that your ordinary sense of your own significance becomes temporarily and usefully adjusted. The smallness that is a relief rather than an insult. The kind that makes the weight you have been carrying feel proportionate to what is actually at stake rather than to the amplified version your anxiety has been presenting.
Gorilla trekking in Uganda in 2027 costs $800 per person for the permit. You need to add flights, accommodation, and transfers. The total for a week in Uganda built around a single trek is approximately $3,000-4,000 from Europe. I describe this because the smallness the forest produces is not free — it requires the decision to prioritise it over other uses of that money and time, which is itself a statement about what you actually value.
The Forest Before the Gorillas
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park has been continuously forested for over 25,000 years. It survived the ice ages that cleared most comparable forest ecosystems. It contains more tree species than the whole of East Africa combined. I knew none of this when I arrived — I learned it afterwards, when I was trying to understand why the forest had affected me as powerfully as it did.
Walking in it is walking in something that was old before human civilisation began and will be old after the specific problems I brought into it have been forgotten by everyone who currently considers them important. The path we walked on had been made by ranger boots over years of patrols. Before the rangers, the path had been made by generations of animals moving through the same forest corridor. Before that, the forest had been making its own paths without any assistance. Walking in it, you feel the weight of that history in the way you feel it in very old buildings — not intellectually, but physically, as a quality of the air and the light and the sound.
The Silverback
We found the Habinyanja group after two and a half hours. The silverback was resting against the base of a large fig tree. He was the most physically authoritative creature I have ever been near — not because he was aggressive or demonstrative, but because his presence in the clearing had a density to it that the presence of other living things simply does not. He occupied his space completely. There was nothing tentative about his existence.
I crouched eight metres away and felt small in the productive sense. Not because he was larger than me — he was, substantially — but because his existence was so unequivocally real and present and grounded in this specific place that my own existence felt, in comparison, somewhat theoretical. I live mostly in my head — in plans, projections, concerns about the future, analyses of the past. The silverback lived entirely in the clearing, in the morning, eating the plant in front of him. The contrast was not unflattering to him.
What Productive Smallness Does
I came back from Uganda less defended against the feeling of not knowing things. Less invested in the appearance of certainty. More willing to sit with questions that do not have answers, because the forest had reminded me that not having answers is the normal condition of living things, and that the silverback was doing fine without any answers at all. This recalibration has persisted, at varying intensities, for the years since. When it fades I think about the fig tree and the clearing and try to find the feeling again.
The permit is $800. If you have been large for too long and need to be small again, Bwindi is reliable. Contact us to plan your 2027 trek.
