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Last summer I had this stage in life where everything was the same ole same ole thing; everything seemed so repetitious. It was repetitious. Get up. Eat food (too much). Go to work. Yakyakyak. Come home. Do some homework. Do all the household chores that never end. Go to bed, sleep well, or not. The saaaaaaammmmmme cycle of activities every day.
Have you ever noticed that something which bores you (dishes, laundry, driving the same road 50 times a week), tends to wear on you like---well, like you're being polished, rubbed, honed, only it ain't nothin' special, it's just hone-hone-hone, then drone-drone-drone-an excruciating droning type of honing? Yes. Just how much more polishing can one person take?
Oh! I got it. Like river rock. We're these large porous semi-sedimentary rocks in the beginning, fluttering in the bottom of Big River O Life. The waters of Life keep rockin' and rollin' over us and once you get your edges rounded off (done all the fun bad things) and your holes filled up (got the family, the job, projects and ideas, minor talents), what is left there on the river bottom except a smooth, roundy-type thing?
I found some treasure last summer on Moolack Beach. Moolack is the windiest beach I've ever been on, with sand tearing out my eyeballs and hair blowing in tornado formation. I was turning into a sandblasting target trying to walk along the sea edge. But up next to the cliff which was less windy, there were lots of these round rocks I'm talking about us turning into. Big, rougher ones on top, smoother medium-sized ones under those, then even smaller, smoother rocks graduated down to sand: The whole thing like a dry river bed protected on one side by the cliff and fighting erosion on the ocean side. I sat down on this bed of rocks. There was less wind. I felt discontented and out of sync. So, I go-I'll look for as round of a rock as I can find and the searching will lure me to quietude.
I found seven perfectly round, though small, stones. Marbles! Each impeccably etched by sea and sand. I found others which I cached in my pocket too that were egg-shaped or flat ovals. I forgot all the wind and sound and was lost in the joy of discovery. As if I had discovered my own round-rock soul--round, smooth, pure and scar-less-down there on the river bottom, and I became free and easy with the peace of my roundness.
Now, why can't my roundness be joyful and delirious every day, or, at least once a week? Would once a month be too much to ask? Because, if all the honing we get by the time we're midlife sands off the flaws and rounds the edges (we'll say it does, if not, then we know how to compensate), then what? Wouldn't we then be rounded and smooth--yes, mundane--within, as well as without?
It turns out I took not just a pocketful of rocks, but something extra with me from Moolack Beach. When I climbed back up the cliff, there was a sprinkling of beach dust in my hair, a gutsy grain of sand lodged firmly between two back molars, my eyes were tearing, and the wind was rushing at me, trying to get in. After I paused midway to look down at the waves, I felt the essence of the sea coming up to surround me with a roaring and crashing, subsiding and caressing motion, and this reminded me that my heart may get broken in the River of Life on occasion, but an hour spent seeking rocky replicas of myself can be magically soul-fixing.
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