“The difference between a boulder and a pebble is perspective.  The rock may be a pebble to a human however, the same rock is a boulder from the perspective of an ant.”  This is one of my “deep thoughts” contained in an old file I found in a folder I created a couple years before I retired.  

Prior to retiring, I knew I wanted to do some writing. The question was, what should I write about?  Coming up with topics was not my concern.  The question for me was about the underlying purpose of my writing. It actually took months to figure it out.  Admittedly my success in meeting my purpose has been mixed. For the record: I want my writing to be about multiple perspectives on any given topic.    

Physically, a rock is what it is. It is the size and the weight it is.  A rock exists where and how it exists.  However, whether that rock is a pebble or a boulder depends on your point of view.  

We might think about the rock as being big, heavy, small, light, pretty, colorful, dull, shiny, interesting, helpful, harmful, calming, valuable, worthless, exciting, unique and the like. However, the actual rock is just a rock. All of these other attributes are more about our perspective than they are about the rock.   

The symbolism of a rock on an engagement / wedding ring includes love and signals the wearer is committed to another.  The inference of that rock includes the idea that this person is or will be legally hitched to another for purposes of things like healthcare coverage. 

A diamond on a wedding ring might cost several thousands of dollars but cubic zirconium engagement rings cost less than fifty dollars on Amazon. Pretty much only experts closely examining the rock can tell the difference between the diamond rock and the rock made out of cubic zirconia. 

The point here is not about marriage, diamonds or pebbles or boulders.  My actual point is that the rock is what it is, yet, most often, our perception of the rock is about what it represents.  This concept is true of most things we interact with.  It is not the actual thing which is important, rather most often, importance is about what the thing represents.  

The boulder represents a substantial object and a pebble something one just steps on or over.  A diamond represents commitment and love. Does a much less expensive rock which looks very much like a diamond represent less love or less commitment?

My dad was a stonemason.  I saw him on many occasions hold a field stone in one hand, spin it around until he lined up the grain of the stone.  He would then hit the stone firmly once or twice with a large hammer and the stone would spit in half. At the age of like nine or ten I would pound on a stone dozens of times and never even come close to making even a mark, let alone splitting it. 

Dad passed away when I was eighteen. Periodically over the years I run across some of the stone work he did.  Once we stopped at a garage sale and the house had a split fieldstone front which was my dad’s work. There is still a small section of his work on Rosedale mall. If you know where to look, you will see some of his work on the U of MN campus mall which is one of the reasons I love the U of MN campus so much.   To me these rocks mean something very different than I would guess they do for most other people.  Depending on your perspective a rock is not just a rock.

In Minnesota the prevailing winds blow from the northwest to the south east.  Which means, quite often, the east / southeast shore of a lake will be sandy. As an aside, the west / northwest shore is most often not sandy.  The wind causes waves to crash on the east shore and the crashing waves push the rocks against each other.  Very slowly the rocks hitting each other, grinds the rocks into sand. Each grain of sand is a small rock chipped off a bigger rock.

Natural diamonds take millions of years to form. Cubic zirconium takes several days to create. Sand is created over many hundreds of thousands of years. Actually, any given grain of sand is not only older than you are, it was probably created prior to the existence of the human race. 

A grain of sand might well be a boulder from the perspective of microscopic organisms and yet from the perspective of an ant it is just something they step over or on.  For humans the sand might be a beautiful beach or something to be swept off our floors.  Sand is what it is but what we think about the sand depends on your perspective. 

In our living room sitting in front of our fireplace is a stone cut into the shape of a heart.  It was cut by my father probably sixty to seventy years ago for a neighbor.  Several years ago when that neighbor was moving into a senior care facility out west where her kids live, she left it on our doorstep with a note that she wanted me to have it.  It is just a rock but my gosh it is certainly not just a rock to me.

This post uses rocks as a tool to discuss perspectives. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the obvious. From the perspective of a rock, for a very short period during their existence, humans interacted with them and in the giant scheme of things, that interaction was probably not very significant.  

The closer you look the more you see.