The Two Piles of Stones and The Meaning of All Our Regrets

Most of us have had late nights where we lie in bed with our eyes open. We look to the side of the bed and, in the darkness, make out two piles of stones.

Some of the stones are smaller and some are larger.

The pile on the left has a stone for every kind and loving thing we ever said or did and the pile on the right has a stone for every unkind and unloving thing we ever said or did. And those things we didn’t say or do? Well, there’s a stone for each of those too. It’s quite a thing to look at and many are kept up late or woken up early by it. The lower layers of that right hand pile bear the familiar colour of, “I can’t believe I did that.” Those just above it hold the hue of, “I can’t believe I did that again.” And the whole pile tells this devastating and humbling story of, “It never occurred to me to do otherwise,” or “I never really knew how,” or “I should have know better,” the story always ending with some version of, “I’m a monster.”

We had spent a lifetime thinking that such moments were for other people, not us. We were young, full of that innocent, bravado of youth. We didn’t imagine things would turn out as they did. We didn’t imagine we would find ourselves here.

Most of these are stones you never bargained for having in your own pile. In the left pile, evidence of kindness and capacity for love you didn’t know you had. In the right pile, evidence of having done things you used to assail and judge others for doing. But now you’ve done it too, and there’s a stone to prove it and your old stories of being a good person, one day, couldn’t bear the weight of them and collapsed.

It’s a human thing to do, looking at these piles, and jarring enough as it goes, but this process is rendered nearly impossible by a the presence of a third thing that is not either of the piles. It is that insistent voice that tells us we have to choose between them.  “You’re either this pile or that pile.” it whispers. “Weigh them and find out for sure.” And so, of course, we sit there terrified to begin the placing those stones onto the scales of what’s become known as justice in our times.

What we want to do is to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. We want to pick up all of those stones in that right-hand pile and take them outside to... well, we don’t know where. But we’d like to start again. We’d like a second chance. ‘Maybe,’ we think to ourselves some mornings as we look out the window. ‘I’ll move to another city and begin again.’ And, sometimes, there’s no finer or more proper idea.

But the stones still come with us, our constant and faithful companions, never letting us forget. The consequences of our past seem to keep having ways of finding us whether in our dreams at night, our wandering thoughts during the day or the look on people’s faces who’ve ‘heard about us’. We can stop our shouting but we can’t take back the sound or stop the echoing.

And the notion of wiping the slate clean isn’t a particularly adult notion. It’s a lot to ask of life. “I know that consequences exist for everyone else but... I was hoping we could strike an arrangement in which I wouldn’t be quite so consequential to the world and that, maybe, if it’s alright for all involved, we could just get rid of those stones, and everyone could forget what I did and didn’t do and I could start again on a fresh canvas.”

The reality seems to be that those stones aren’t going anywhere and that they are the ones doing the asking. They are asking something of us. Part of what they may be asking us, patiently because they’re going to last longer than we are, is to come to terms with the reality that what we did is now a part of our story. It’s a stone, large and heavy, in our pile of regrets and it won’t go away until long after we’re gone. Instead of trying to bury the stones, pretending it never happened and making them disappear, I think that we are being asked to ensure that they appear in all that we do moving forward. We aren’t being asked to vanish them, or fix them. We are being asked to feature them. If we try to hide them, and showcase only our best stones in their most flattering light, they may be found later and lead to an immense feeling of betrayal that we had been lying the whole time.

An elder I know told me once about how certain Native American tribes would, during a big ceremony, have Buffalo skulls play a certain function that could speak to our relationship to our many regrets in life. “But man, I tell you what, once you’ve done that thing for a while, well...” he paused. “I put them up on my mantle. They’re my stories and I tell them to help you now and to recognize those troubles I went through in your own life.” This was a man who didn’t want to hide his regrets but to find a way they could serve somebody other than him.

There doesn’t seem to be much percentage in doing this for ourselves. It’s hard to make a compelling case, appealing to someone’s self interest, to someone to take the jagged stones of their defeat and shame and show them around to others because of what we believe those stones mean about us: that we are failures, adulterers, leches, liars, lazy, untrustworthy, predators, vain, destructive, abusive, weak and more.

Of course, if we try to bury the evidence of our indictments, there’s a chance they will be found later and that others will feel more deeply betrayed by us by the hiding and that this will add another stone, perhaps the biggest, to our pile but such possibilities don’t do much to disuade people from trying. And, of course, there’s the deep stress of hiding in the first place and the constant fear of being discovered, but we still do it.

No, on the level of self-interest, most people would rather take their chances at hiding the stones than showing them to others and risking rejection, judgment and a permantly tarnished reputation (and, in some cases, this may be the wisest of considerations). The primary benefits of letting these stones be seen, aside from our own ability to relax, do not accrue to us. We do not, primarily, do this for ourselves.

We do it for those who are coming after us so that they can taste a bit of how life can be, so that, when they find themselves lying in bed, with their eyes open, they will know they are not the first and not alone.

Many are, as I write these words, unable to sleep for the lack of any real evidence that this might be true.

I think we are being asked to see that the meaning of what we did, evidenced by these stones, isn’t finished yet; that the meaning of what we did will come from what ourselves and others do with these stones after they have been laid in our piles. That meaning is a fashioned thing.

We can spend a lifetime, trapped inside the rickety-shack of our own self-concern, weighing out the stones and praying that the good will outweigh the bad leaving our shelter only when we see the scales tipping in the direction of our fears, to desperately do as much good as we can so that we might return with a few more stones in our pockets to balance the scales.

But why must we be forced to choose?

What if those stones weren’t there to be weighed out so that our sentence can be meted out? What if we have misunderstood their function utterly? What if they’re not there as evidence to help us, and others  decide whether we are, deep down, mostly a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ person? What if they’re not Exhibits A and B in a court built from the timbers of punitive justice?

What if those stones are there, in part, to add some gravity to our days? What if our contending with these piles honestly, the heartbreaking wrestling with the question of, “How can I be both?” may be one of the most human-making endeavours there is? What if these stones are not here to make us right or wrong, but more grown up than we were?

What if the meaning of those stones is not set inside of the stone, but rather in the manner they are set together?

What if something is being asked of us here that we might never have imagined?

What if what’s being asked of us is to come closer to those stones? To take them, one by one, in our hands, and, with the mortar of our humility and willingness to be heartbroken and utterly undone by what we’ve learned about ourselves and life, make something of beauty with them so that the piles don’t remain lying there when we die for others to have to sort through. What if every stone from both piles belonged in this deep work of art of being human? What if no stone needed to be left out or, to state it more clearly, what if, to complete the work being asked of us, no stone could be left out?

Perhaps you will build a wall to keep your community safe. Perhaps it will be a bridge to connect those who couldn’t reach each other. Perhaps it will be a house to keep warm those who’ve only known cold.

What if the meaning of those stones is not set inside of the stone, but rather in the manner they are set together?

Why must we be forced to choose between those piles?

Art made from the ‘good’ stones only is anaemic; the new age, light-filled sentiments and memes that flood the internet. Art made from the ‘bad’ stones only is cynical; the sad poems overflowing with self-pity and lethargy that serve no one and feed nothing beyond our own unending sense of shame. But, if you use them together? There-in lies every masterpiece of art you’ve ever seen; the grit of humanity mixed with the transcendent, the beautiful ugliness, the contradictions and heartbreak of being alive in these times made visible.

There is another voice you can listen to that doesn’t insist you choose or ask you, “What do these piles of stones mean about you?” as if you were the only human which two such piles, but rather, “What meaning might be made of these two piles?”

It’s not a bad question to ask of others either.

Maybe those stones aren’t meant to be an altar to our self-loathing or our self-glorification. Maybe they’re meant to be the raw materials from which an altar might yet be made in that strange, old mix of grief and praise, that eloquent, articulated hallelujah to something much bigger and more mysterious than we anticipated. They could be the individual components of an outrageous gift, the likes of which the world has never seen.

They may be a mess but it may be that mess is not what we imagined it to be.

Our thoughts that the stones in the right hand pile shouldn’t be there are what prevent us from using them for any good purpose and untold amounts of labour will be left for those yet to come as someone will be forced to contend with the stones left behind.

Why must we be forced to choose?

Creating beauty in the face of destruction is a legitimate and important response (whether the destruction was created by yourself or others). It is not the only response but it has its rightful place in the world. It is our manifest amen to the immense complexity of being human. This kind of art is a food capable of feeding something larger than us and, if it is not made, many go hungry.

Books and poems made in this way, paintings done in this style, songs fashioned from this old knowing remind people that they are not alone in their struggles, that they are not the first humans to ever be defeated by life and disappointed by their best efforts. If you’re ever able to say the words, “I don’t have much to bring except my grief for all that I’ve done, all that I’ve never done, and all the things that never occurred to me to do, fashioned into something beautiful.” you’ll have done well and be giving the fine gift. But the labour of crafting it into something beautiful and useful is the key.

And those good stones. Let’s not forget those. They are often the result of tremendous luck on our end and taking them for granted in the art we make does them no honour at all.

When you go to bed tonight, and you may look over and see those two familiar piles. And you may hear that old familiar voice goading you to into weighing them so you can find out which one you are. Well, that voice is an old voice indeed, the inheritance of generations of cultural trauma; the banishing of wholeness in the quest for purity. It’s likely more tired than you’ll ever know how to be. You might invite it to sleep for a while and to invite that other voice, older still, to wake from its slumbers and wonder with you about what kind of ecstatic beauty you might fashion from all of this rubble, the fruition and failure of your best intent, the testimony of your days.