“You can throw it down, it’s just a rock.”
I recently told my daughter that when she located a rock and treated it like this precious object before getting in the car. I thought about this later, how it seemed valuable to her in that moment, how it doesn’t take much to see value from a different perspective.
The smallest, most insignificant rock that finds sanctuary on the highway means little to you until a tire sends it ricocheting off of your windshield, fracturing the glass along with what little clarity you may have enjoyed for a moment, or for a lifetime.
It’s easy to care about so many things.
Singing Disney songs with my daughter at bedtime (still trying to get over how sexist Mulan really is, even for the 90s), making sure that the people I love can feel that from me without relying solely on words, white chocolate pretzels, antiques that hold life and stories, playing music, finding God in everything from a tapered Wyoming sunset to the lavender blossoms emerging with victory on my porch after I thought I accidentally drowned them, preparing food to share with people I care about, listening to my grandmother’s stories, Mexican culture and retaining what I can of it to share with my little girl since it’s in her blood too. . .
Most of all, I care about people. What else are we really doing with our lives if not intrinsically connecting them to other lives? I care about peoples’ lives—the voices who aren’t always the loudest, the fear behind the ones who are, the women with resilience, and those who need encouragement to find hope.
I care about impact and how we are all walking around leaving footprints on people with little regard to the effects of our presence on another’s self—with little regard for not only what people see when they look at us, but what we see when we look at ourselves.
There are moments in my life that I’m proud of, I can live with them—a heroine of sorts whom you just want to root for during the entire episode because so many meaningful choices were made.
Other moments, I still cringe over their existence, wishing I had turned the channel, still finding acceptance of them difficult, still aching over how I could ever allow such miscalculated blunders to come inside and take a seat—questioning how my body failed me by not rejecting so much difficulty and instead, offered refuge to parts of the world I wish I never knew.
But the end result is the same.
I am here. I see and know more about myself, my capabilities, my fears, my limits, and my resilience than I probably ever even thought about before.
I know what endurance means, what proximity can conquer and sometimes break, and the despair in an unrecognizable reflection. Knowing that showed me how to get beyond it.
Love and kindness are natural for humanity. We have instincts to want to help people, encourage people, motivate people, rescue someone in need–physically or emotionally, inspire and reassure children—even over something as small as a rock full of enchantment, a “Moana’s heart of Te Fiti,” as my daughter called it.
Value is really wrapped up in a nice little perspective package, permissible only to its holder. Sometimes, the rock that shatters the windshield carries more purpose than just inconvenience, and losing sight of everything is what has to happen before you can really see yourself.
It’s exhausting, trying to maintain a fighting chance when nature is running its course all over your heartstrings, but it matters to stay resilient, to assign value to your own rocks without devaluing someone else’s, to appreciate the little things that bring you joy. Sometimes, you just let your kid take the rock and retain that sense of enchantment. And sometimes, finding out more about yourself opens a line of reflection for someone else and you inspire people without even realizing you’re doing it.
God bless,
M
Blue Withens 