The Tale of the Rock

When I was around seven, I took the bus to school every day, and would pass by a corner where a rock was sitting on the front part of a wall. Every day I’d look out for that rock, and every day it’d be there. For five years I was on the same bus route, and that rock never moved. Rain, sun, fog.

It’s still there.

The rock was constant. No matter what changed around me, every day I could look out the right side window at Brea Blvd and Panorama Rd and it’d be there.

It was time made slow and every day I’d be nervous that the rock would be gone. It’d change my world.

Now….

Go outside and find a rock.

This rock is a small piece of the earth.

But you can hold it, and manipulate it. If you move it and let it rest, it’ll stay at rest long after you’re gone.

But you in the end have moved the earth, even if just a piece of it.

It’s too easy to get caught up in the macro, especially when the time and space of the world have been collapsed to endless scrolling tweets and news headlines. A life across the country matters as much as the life in front of you.

But in the end, it really doesn’t. It does in the micro sense to those tied to that person, but it’s too easy — now especially — to get caught up in the macro where everything is the same, and equally consequential.

You are just one of 7 billion, and your sphere of influence may be large — it may be infinitely large depending on who you are — but even if so, the direct effect of you living is as consequential as you perceive it. If you go outside and move a rock, you’ve moved the earth after all.

If you close your phone and just sit, you’ve moved yourself. If you sit with another person, you’ve moved the world entire in the micro sense. What is a world in the end other than two people agreeing that something happened?

The scale of our place in the world has been convoluted by our perception of the impact we can have through the things others have done. People invented the Internet, it collapsed space. People invented Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and suddenly identity, time, space, culture and — hell — time zones are eliminated. But only if we chose to.

In the end, there are incontrovertible things that can’t be influenced by cleverness. The sun will still move in the sky and the earth will still rotate. The moon will go full and then wane. People will get older and our kids older still.

We will lose people, people will be born, the cycles will repeat. It’s too easy to get overwhelmed thinking you have to catch all of these things — this sand — before it slips through your hand.

But you don’t. Sometimes you just need to go, find the rock and move it. Change the world. For what is a rock but sand made consequential, and within our individual power to change.