Rocks
I have a story to share.
More of an observation, really.
Lemme back up.
I have a pet ball python. I know a lot of people are scared of snakes, but ball pythons are actually charmingly timid.
They are not apex predators. Other things eat ball pythons. And the ball pythons know this. Beyond their lidless eyes, etched in every cell in their body, is a set of instructions to avoid being caught and eaten.
For them, it mostly involves curling up and hiding. (They’re named after their tendency to curl up into balls.) They like using their lithe, clever little bodies to get into tiny spaces where they can feel the walls on every side of them at all times. That might seem cramped to you, but to them it feels cozy. It feels like some place they won't be yanked out of by a predator. It feels safe.
Conversely, they hate wide open places.
Their faces are expressionless, but you can tell how comfortable they are somewhere by how much they try to leave.
I tried to bathe my python recently. She's big enough to need the bath tub (none of the tupperware we have is big enough), but the tub is still much too big of an empty space to be comfortable for her. The moment she was placed into this vast featureless ceramic void, she panicked and tried to find a way out. Feeling exposed is a terrifying prospect for a ball python. They know things are out there. Looking for them. And feeling exposed means knowing there's nothing between them and those big scary somethings.
You can calm them down relatively easily, though. If you place a rock in the tub with them, it soothes them. Why? Because they can curl up around the rock, and in doing so, they can feel a surface up against the side of their body, and it feels like safety. Even though they’re wrapped around the outside of the rock, no less exposed to any potential predators. But just being able to touch that rock is enough. It feels like “following the plan”. It's an anchor to the things they think they know about the world.
Rocks mean safety. The floor means safety.
It doesn’t matter that for years and years and years, my scaly little girl has comfortably lived in a home where nothing has tried to eat her - hell, she hasn’t even seen a predator in who-knows-how-long. She knows that being exposed is bad. Being exposed triggers those deep, loud hormonal reminders that there are Things Out There, and they are looking for her.
In my bathtub.
To be fair to her, she can't begin to understand the idea of a bathroom. Or an apartment - much less the urban high-rise apartment we live in. Can you imagine? This little, ground-dwelling creature, whose greatest aspiration is a comfortable hole in the dirt, realizing that she’s actually floating hundreds of feet in the air. That, just 5 feet past the tub she’s in, past our bathroom wall, is sky. That there is a an unthinkably enormous expanse between her and the real ground. That there’s so much emptiness around her at all times - except it’s not empty, it’s full of things. Things like us, that are somehow comfortable in those vast voids all around her, moving through them.
Looking for her.
She needs her rock.
She doesn’t have any other genetic instructions for how to react to all that.
And really, we're no different, right?
I mean, you've felt the same. I know you have.
I have.
Maybe it happened to you like it did to me, when I was a kid on a pier out fishing with my parents, and I slipped and fell into the water. It was just a fishing pier, in a bay - not even the open ocean - but all at once, I instantly felt the enormity of the body of water around me, and in a split second I felt adrift. Swallowed whole.
I was only just barely out of arm's reach of the pier - also made of rocks, funnily enough - but being disconnected physically from it was dizzying. And again, this was in a bay - barely even a bathtub compared to the scale of the incomprehensibly bigger body of water it was attached to.
Maybe you actually fell off a boat in the open sea, or snorkeled a bit too far out.
Or maybe you were in the woods once and, for just that one moment, your hiking partner was out of sight, and took just a few seconds too many to respond to you. And you looked around you and all the trees and stones and leaves were just like dark water all around you, unnavigable, indifferent.
Maybe it happened when you were in a foreign city, where you didn't speak the language, and your phone unexpectedly ran out of batteries, and all the lights from buildings around you were rendered no more helpful or comforting than the cold stars in the sky.
Maybe it happened a million different ways. Humans are much braver than ball pythons. We constantly go places we shouldn't.
And when we lose touch with our rocks, even for just an instant, we are reminded of that fact.
Because in that instant, all our genetic instructions scream at us, with all the clarity and volume and raw urgency that they do in my pet snake. At that moment, when we're in some place much bigger than us - much bigger than we can understand - our reptile brains are telling us, with absolute certainty, that there is something else out there.
Looking for us.
