I am a river, not a rock
“I am a river, not a rock.” This quote makes me think of water, its infinite movement and shifting. Makes me think of liquid molecules sliding around all slippery. The river flows, it ebbs, it meanders. The river bank is a suggestion, a draft written in pencil, not marker.
The rock — its jagged edges, its pock marks from erosion, its sediment — is finite. It has an outline, definition. Its atoms vibrate but don’t shift so much. The rock is stagnant and shaped by outside forces — chipped and eroded, melted and cooled. But the river, she is wide and deep and narrow and shallow and calm and rocky and everything in between. She isn’t still, even if it looks like it from the dock on a quiet fall evening. She changes shape and form as needed, always searching for balance, equilibrium.
This idea of being a river and not a rock is one I summon to find peace in periods of tumult: I will not always feel this way, things will not always be this way. This is only one of many moments in my experience of life.
While I desperately want to be the river, I am hard-wired instead to be the rock. I am rigid in my ways and my mindset. I am a people pleaser, a good girl, and a perfectionist. These ways of moving through the world do not mix well with wild running water. When I notice myself being rigid and rocklike, I tend to react with shame, inciting a chemical reaction that only hardens me. So this is my work — to find my own softness, to allow my shape to fill whichever container I find myself in.
My therapist has helped me to see that my desire to control things, to maintain sameness and routine, comes from anxiety and fear. It’s a game I’m destined to lose every time, because I cannot control anything. I have a cute piece of art as the wallpaper on my phone that reads “You are not in control and you never have been.” I see this reminder hundreds of times a day and it registers with me maybe a dozen. And yet — I still try to control my environment.
“I am a river not a rock” is an invitation to freedom, an open doorway to a magnificent world of letting go. When I find myself fretting over the thunderstorm out the window and how it might be affecting my tomato plants in their community garden plot five blocks yonder, I am a rock. But when I listen to the rain pelting the sheet metal of the window AC unit and try to visualize what it would be like to be tucked in a cloud at that very moment that the thunder rumbles across the sky, I am the river.
My tomato plants will get doused and maybe broken whether I’m thinking about them or not.
Speaking of being the river, if you’re able to support East Kentuckians who are experiencing deadly floods due to climate change, please do! Here’s a place to donate.
