Rocks and pebbles

My parents gave me a stone tumbler when I was about seven or eight years old. A thick cylinder of orangey-brown plastic with removable white caps at either end, it was maybe a little larger in diameter than a piece of drain pipe and sat on top of a small bronze coloured motor. The stone tumbler would magically turn my handful of dirty sharp pebbles into gleaming polished gems. Irresistible.

I selected my first stones with care: purples and mauves and pink glass-veined quartz, mysterious dark brown pieces and some that were as inky and as timeless as the night sky. Added fine charcoal grey grit. Poured in some water. Switched on the electricity to make the fan belt driven motor run. And waited. And waited. And waited. The little stone tumbler ran hour after hour, day after day after day. I kept stopping it, of course, to see how the gems were doing. Were they done yet? Was my little plastic tube now full of sparkling jewels?

No matter how often I looked, there never seemed to be any difference. One day, after looking for signs of progress and - of course - finding none, I must have forgotten to switch the motor back on. Perhaps I was just impatient. Or maybe I'd decided, in my seven or eight year old way, that it must somehow be a trick like the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, for I never did turn it on again.

More than three decades on, my little stone tumbler popped back into my mind today after some fascinating comments from Fram and Roo that followed a book review that I wrote a few days ago. Specifically, it got me to thinking about if we change with age - and if so, how those changes manifest themselves.

So some personal reflections on change as a by-product of age:

I no longer burn to have the answer, only the answers that I need to the questions I choose to ask. I select the questions I want to ask with great care. I will have fresh questions to ask for as long as I have a heartbeat. I believe that, when it comes to others, a person will reveal as much (or as little) of him- or herself as they choose to at any given moment. Pushing, prodding, prying for a premature revelation achieves no more than backing a lion into a corner: he or she can now move only one way, and the outcome will be good for neither of us.

I sat by a large pond in a sunny quadrangle today. Golden carp wriggled and splashed within the deep green water. On the grass, three baby coots followed the neatly picked steps of their elegant red-beaked mother as she pecked and foraged for insects and sandwich crumbs. For carp and coots alike, this pond, this quad, is their whole universe. They were born here, will live, breed, nurture, grow old and die here.

To look at the quad as a prison, though, is to look with wrong eyes: from the outside. From the inside, this is their world, their home, their life and their refuge. It is our paradoxical, unique human tragedy that we are rarely satisfied with our own quadrangle, however beautiful, bountious or peaceful it may be. We shin up the walls and peep out of the compound. Exotic equals good, we think, familiar equals bad, or dull at the very least. We cannot help ourselves. It is as much in our restless, relentless genes as to roll and thunder and crash with foam is the way of the ocean. This is not to imply that ambition or the desire for change, for self-improvement, are bad things. Far from it. Rather to say that the rest we take at the end of the day is as valid and as vital as the labours constrained within it. This, in particular, took me a very long time to learn.

A tiny money spider has been exploring the back of my hand as I've been writing. My hand, my arm, the hem of my skirt, are temporarily part of his world; and he is part of mine. For some of us, the concept of home is as clearly defined as the four walls of the quad are to the carp and the coots: any elsewhere is alien. For others of us, the walls of our quad encompass the four corners of the earth. One view is not better than another. Just different.

There is no doubt that age continues to knock the rough edges off me just as the relentless oceans polish the sharpest of granites to smooth round pebbles. The same way that my stone tumbler would have done if I had had the patience to let it.