Boulders of the Heart

Have you ever walked around with something that you couldn’t let go?  A weight which never got lighter, no matter how long you carried it?

For me, it feels like trying to live your life around a boulder in your heart.

These boulders can take many forms: Maybe it’s guilt over a thing you’ve done or a thing you should’ve done but didn’t.  Maybe you can’t let go of a person who got away, or the daily grind of the one you pray would just go away.

Maybe you worry about money, or school, or money to pay for school, or the money you borrowed to pay for school which hasn’t really gotten you where you need to be.

Maybe you just really worry about that one time you burped in 1998 and everyone in class laughed at you and you can’t forget the shame and embarrassment and that one thought eats you alive until one day you realize you’ve had your eighth cup of coffee and it’s only 7 AM.

Maybe that last one is just me.

Regardless, the boulder is impossible to get rid of.  It’s a freaking boulder.  I mean, what would you do if there was suddenly a boulder right outside your house?  You wake up one Wednesday and BOOM, 6000 pounds of rock right where it doesn’t belong, living large right out where everyone can see.

Right away, you know that it’s going to take an extraordinary amount of money and effort to get rid of that boulder.  And it’s devastated the garden you worked so hard on that summer; those turnips have bought it

So you live your life around the stupid thing, knowing it’s a problem, knowing it’s causing issues, but also knowing you lack both the funds and the know-how to make it get off your carrots.  You start wearing a path in the dirt around it, because you’re just trying to get to the garage and it’s easier not to try and deal with it.  It’s a boulder, and you aren’t.

And then one morning you’re drinking your ninth cup of coffee and you realize just how much the rock has distorted your life.  Your house has settled, cracking in places it shouldn’t.  Your garden is gone, never to return.  The path you’ve worn in the dirt?  You paved that ages ago thinking that was the best solution to the muddy shoes everyone at work complained about.

You want to do something about it, but its become a part of your life now.  You don’t even see it when you look out the window.  You feel that dealing with it will upend whatever fragile sense of normality you’ve managed to gather ever since it arrived.  You’re scared:  The boulder is what you know now, and fixing it now is even more work than it was going to be back when you couldn’t afford to fix it in the first place.  Besides, you spent so much time and money making the path decorative as well as functional.  Those bricks look amazing.

Eventually, you can’t maintain the fiction any longer.  One too many storms moves the boulder, crushes your beautiful path, and smashes a section of the house.  The boulder has to go because it’s a boulder and it shouldn’t be there in the first place and you should’ve dealt with it a long time ago no matter what it would’ve cost.

So you deal with it.  You sign the forms, you hire the companies, you have it removed.

Then it’s gone, removed from your life with the same abruptness as it had arrived.  The damage remains however.  The barren crater of earth which was once a bountiful garden.  The smashed path, misshapen and ugly now that there wasn’t a reason for it to curve as it did.  That’s not to mention all the damage its done to your house.

Things are better because the boulder is gone.  Things are worse because now you have to fix everything it broke.

All you can do is roll up your sleeves, do all the crying deemed necessary, and start healing.  You owe it to yourself.  Just as I owe it to myself.

I loved that garden.  It’s about time I had it back.

Boulderfully,

The Unsheathed Quill