The Perfect Skipping Rock
Over the last week and a half, I’ve gotten to spend some time in my favorite place in the world: The San Juan Islands. My aunt and uncle have a place that sits on 40-foot bluff overlooking the islands. I’ve been coming to this piece of land sine before they even had a house on it. I remember eating Annie’s Shells & White Cheddar mac n cheese in their unfinished basement, roasting smores by the fire, and looking for creatures in tidepools as a kid. As I’ve grown and moved away from the Pacific Northwest, it is a place that I have loved to come back to. To me, it is without a doubt the most beautiful place in the world.
The last ten days have been filled with beyond delicious food, days of sailing, laughter and reminiscing over a beer while looking at the islands. One of my other favorite things about this place is the rock skipping. My aunt and uncle have a small trail that leads down to the water from their property. This beach holds the world’s best skipping rocks. Now, I may be biased, but these rocks are perfect to skip on a day when the water is smooth as glass. One this beach, you can find tons of rocks that seem to hover over the water. When they inevitably go into the sea, they don’t plop into the water, they almost glide to a stop over the top of the water and slowly sink into the eelgrass below. I could skip rocks on this beach for hours.
Rocks on this beach are not simply magically great for skipping. There is a process by which they can become this. Most of the rocks on this beach are sandstone. The process of weathering over time on sandstone turns these rocks into the perfect rocks to skip. As weather, tides, and waves continually maneuver and manipulate sandstone, it begins to turn these rocks into rocks that are fantastic to skip.
One of the biggest issues I see with clients that do not experience change or growth is that they believe it should be instantaneous. That is to say, they don’t want change to take any time. When I sense that clients come in with this expectation, the initial work of therapy becomes helping those clients to see it may take some time for the wounds they’ve dealt with for the last 2 decades to heal. The reality of therapy is that it can be a process that takes time. This isn’t to say that growth should not occur or it would be wrong to expect it, but if the expectation is that complete healing is going to come in three sessions, we have set ourselves up for failure. I often get asked, “what types of clients are your favorites to work with?” While there are certain issues I see on a more regular basis, the clients I enjoy working with are the ones that are motivated. The individuals that realize things need to change, and it might take some time to get there. These are the people that hold the capacity to transform into the perfect type of skipping rocks.
