I’ve always found it oddly fascinating to step back and consider why we do the things we do. Some actions carry purpose. Others are driven by compulsion, curiosity, or maybe the simple human urge to leave a mark—evidence not that we accomplished something grand, but simply that we existed.
Trish and I were walking past the Coast Guard House in Narragansett, Rhode Island, when I noticed the rocks.
Not just scattered naturally, but stacked—intentionally and with varying degrees of ambition. Some balanced meticulously, others tossed together with a shrug of creativity. What were these little towers trying to say? Were they declarations of skill? Acts of boredom? Art? Meditation? A quiet rebellion against the impermanence of nature?
Whatever the motive, I found myself inexplicably drawn to them. Why?
These stacks have no real future. One strong wave, a gust of wind, the first freeze of winter—they’ll be gone. Nature resets the canvas as easily as it provides the raw materials. And yet here I stood, pausing my walk, staring at these fragile monuments. And of course, I took pictures.
My grandfather once tried to teach me something about worry. I can’t recall what troubled me at the time, but I remember the lesson vividly: he had me fill a bucket with water and stir it into a violent whirlpool. Then he told me to walk away, wait a few minutes, and come back.
When I returned, the water was calm—silent, smooth, undisturbed. The chaos had resolved itself without my intervention. Everything, he said, “comes round.”
Maybe these rock stacks are the same lesson, expressed through a different pair of hands. Maybe each person who built one returns later to see if their creation survived—only to find that nature returned everything to neutral. Or maybe someone simply couldn’t resist the impulse to balance stone upon stone until the world felt ordered, if only for a moment.
It’s equally possible there was just one person, in a brief manic episode, building as fast as thoughts could fly.
The truth? We’ll never know.
But standing there, considering a dozen anonymous pyramids of seaside geology, I realized something: the meaning wasn’t in the stacks themselves. It was in the questions they prompted, the pause they forced, the reflection they sparked.
Maybe we build things—not because they last, but because we do not.
And maybe it’s enough to leave a temporary testament to the fact that, for a fleeting moment…
I was here.
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