Pond Scum

I'm pretty sure about one thing in my life. I don't think like everybody else. This has been made clear to me many many times in the course of my life and in every subject imaginable.

Most people think linear-ly, like a river. Thoughts flow from the source of the stream, through a well defined channel and end in an ocean. There may be obstacles in the way, and they have to find their way through the delta, but the smart ones find a way around those obstacles.

There is nothing in me that thinks like a river.

Think of a smooth still body of water. Toss a pebble into it. Watch the ripples. There are no steps with tidy ends and beginnings, there is no point to point process, there is only ever a gentle wave moving along, in clarity and confidence and sureness. Toss in a second pebble at a different point in the pond and you have competing and complementing ripples. The complementing waves can carry me along to a whole other place of thought that is unexpected, often delightful, a tangent to where I was going in the first place. When the ripples compete fiercely, I have been known to hang on ever tighter to the first ripple.

Toss two pebbles into a river. The ripples are not nearly so clear in a river. River ripples are best seen near the edges, on the periphery, near the wall. Ripples might seem to be easily overwhelmed by the river, but they are there.

I think I am going to make a pair of socks with Socks That Rock Pond Scum just to remind myself that even though the ripple is perfectly clear to me, it may not be so to others. They will serve to remind me that sometimes I hang on to an idea just a little too strongly.

More than that, Pond Scum, of the mossy, warm, rich greens, will be to remind me that even though ripples may be overwhelmed in a river and pushed to the periphery, they are no less beautiful.