What Exactly Is a Rock?

Imagine a Rock sitting in the middle of the trail.

Five Travelers can stand around it. They can all point to the same thing and say, “Yep. That happened.” And still, none of them may be carrying quite the same Rock away.

One noticed the sound. One remembers what happened immediately afterward. One was frightened. One was relieved. One barely understood what was happening until much later. Someone had hoped for an entirely different ending. Someone else arrived carrying a history that changed what this moment meant to them.

The event matters. Facts matter. But a human being does not experience life as a list of facts on an incident report.

We live it.

We notice things. We miss things. We feel things. We remember. We wonder. We expect. We fear. We hope. Sometimes we fill in blanks before we even realize there were blanks.

All of that can become part of the story we carry.

In the Sassiverse, the Rock is your story of the experience.

Not the official story. Not the story everybody else is required to have. Not necessarily the story you will tell forever.

Your story, from where you stood.

The event and the Rock are connected. They are not identical.

Suppose a workplace announces a major change.

The announcement is the shared event.

One person hears possibility. Another immediately wonders whether their job is safe. Someone who has lived through three reorganizations hears the same words and feels exhausted before the meeting is over. Another person is excited and then feels guilty because a friend is terrified. Someone else does not think much about it until they get home that night.

Same announcement.

Different lived experiences.

Different Rocks.

That does not mean facts become whatever anyone wants them to be. It means the facts of an event and a person's experience of those facts are two different things worth noticing.

This distinction becomes surprisingly useful later. If we mistake our Rock for the only possible story of the event, we can end up trying to make everybody else stand where we stood. If we pretend our Rock is nothing more than the event, we may lose the parts that actually explain why it mattered so much to us.

Your Rock may contain more than you knew at first

Sometimes the first story is simply, “This hurt.”

That may be all you have.

Later you might realize part of the Rock was losing something you expected to have. Or not being heard. Or being frightened. Or discovering you did not have the control you thought you had. Or learning something that changes how you understand what happened.

Sometimes you learn more and your story changes.

That does not make the earlier version fake.

It means you know something now that you did not know then.

Jenny has an entire old blog that accidentally documents this phenomenon. 😂 There are places where Earlier Jenny wrote from everything she knew at the time—and Later Jenny eventually had enough new information to say, essentially, take some of that earlier stuff with a grain of salt.

Jedi was a huge part of that Becoming. Jenny wanted very badly to help him. She was determined. She gathered advice from every direction and tried approach after approach. For a long time, success still lived inside the story she had imagined: if she learned enough, worked hard enough, found the right method, surely she could get them where she thought they were supposed to go.

But Jedi kept supplying information.

Eventually Jenny could see something she had not been able to see at the beginning. Part of listening to Jedi meant letting go of the future she had been trying to create for him. The answer was not another perfect technique. Jedi needed to be Jedi. Home was where he could be comfortable.

The years before that realization did not vanish. The attempts did not vanish. The earlier stories did not become evidence that Jenny was foolish for not knowing the ending before she lived the middle.

She knew what she knew.

Then she had more information.

Then the story she could tell changed.

What if I don't know my story yet?

Then you don't.

The Sassiverse does not need you to manufacture an insight because you opened a book about Rocks.

You may only know:

Something happened.

This is affecting me.

I don't have words for the rest yet.

That is already information.

Questions can come later. Another part of the Library may give you language you did not have. Life may give you information you do not have yet. You may reread this page someday and discover that it appears to have mysteriously rewritten itself.

It probably has not.

You might have.

If you want something to wonder about...

You do not need to answer these. They are simply places your curiosity could wander:

And if your answer is approximately:

“Jeff, this thing is the size of a municipal building.”

You do not have to pick the Rock up. You do not have to understand all of it. You do not have to solve it because you noticed it.

For now, this is enough:

Something happened. I lived it from where I stood. This is the story I carry right now.

That's a Rock.