I have this rock I picked up at a national park in Mumbai. A light-coloured, perfectly round rock with spiral lineation running along its surface. It may be an odd hobby, but I have always liked collecting rocks. However, I usually end up throwing them away within a couple day because pretty as they might be, there’s not much you can really do with a rock. I thought this would be the case for this rock to but surprisingly enough, even after all these years and a trip across the globe, I still have it with me.
At first I just didn’t have the heart to throw it away. It was too perfect a rock, almost circular with a completely smooth surface . So I just kept it on my desk and eventually forgot about it. It lay there catching dust until I was packing to leave for university. On an impulse, for some inexplicable reason, I decided to pack this rock to take it with me to Canada. I thought I could use it as paperweight, but that was just an excuse (after all, who even uses paperweight in this day and age?).
I had never lived away from home. In all my eighteen years of existence, I had never faced a situation where I had to pack my entire life into a suitcase to move to a place entirely foreign to me. Even after cramming most of my belongings into a suitcase, there was still an entire house worth of my cherished items that I had to leave behind. My belongings have always been sacred to me. I did not even have the heart to throw away my elementary school textbooks but here I was, abandoning almost everything that I held close to my heart. My favourite books, my childhood photo albums, the old wooden box filled with random knick knacks that I had collected over the years; I had to leave almost all of it behind. I stuffed this tiny rock in between my clothes, a desperate attempt to lay claim to anything I could get my hands on. Though I could not take everything with me, I would do my best to take anything I could, even this tiny inconsequential rock.
Now, I have been living in Canada for almost four years. I have painstakingly built a whole new ecosystem of objects of my own. Books, clothes, shoes, and other random paraphernalia. Almost everything I brought over from India has either been discarded or replaced, and the few things I have left have melded into my new life so well that I can hardly distinguish between my old belongings and the ones I acquired here. Everything changed, but that rock still remains. I have moved thrice, and every single time I have made sure to take the rock with me. A lot of people have asked about its significance and I never really know what to say in response to that. It seems a bit strange and even a little foolish to tell people that I brought this plain-looking rock from India. This is in line with Turkle’s statement that we are more comfortable with objects that have a specific use rather than considering objects as something with an emotional connection (5). Perhaps the rock’s lack of purpose is precisely why it has stood the test of time. If it truly had some use, it would have been abandoned once it stopped serving that purpose.
The Rock as an Object of Transition and Passage
Of course, the rock is not the only object from India I have with me. But the rock has assumed a special place in my life, as an active reminder of home. Turkle claims that such periods of transition make a person vulnerable to the objects and experiences from that period of transition. She draws on Victor Turner’s idea of liminality, emphasising how times of transition are an important site for the creation of new symbols. Drawing from these ideas, I believe this period of transition granted this otherwise innocuous object the affordance of being a symbolic representation of home and my life at the time. A freeze frame, capturing a very specific moment in time.
During that transitional period, when I was thrust into a completely new environment, this rock served as a comforting reminder of home. A real, tangible proof that I was once familiar with the land that now feels so foreign to me. This lines up with Turkle’s observation that during traditional rites of passage, when person is forced to part with all that they consider to be familiar, they are more susceptible to objects and experiences of that time. At a time my life was in constant flux, this rock was the only constant. Not only does the rock embody a specific time and place, but it has also come to represent that version of myself—one who was so desperate to hold onto the past that she clung on to anything she could, even a tiny old rock.
Since then, I’ve moved several times, and with each move, I’ve grown more comfortable with the idea of letting things go. Change no longer unsettles me the way it once did. So now, after all this time, the rock no longer serves solely as a reminder of home. Instead, I’ve come to see it as a thread linking together the different versions of myself that have emerged through each transition in my life.
Works Cited
- Turkle, Sherry. “WHAT MAKES AN OBJECT EVOCATIVE.” Evocative Objects: Objects We Think With, 307–326.
- Turkle, Sherry. “INTRODUCTION: THE THINGS THAT MATTER.” Evocative Objects: Objects We Think With, 3–10.
I definitely share the sentiment of holding onto seemingly useless things: I actually have two examples, one where the object mediates the sense of place, another when it mediates the sense of time or even ideology.
First one is the empty plastic can of gum that I cannot make myself throw into a trashcan, because I bought it a couple of days before leaving home, and it’s the only russian gum can I will see for around two years. It takes me back in space, in a way.
Second one is my grandfather being mad at my uncle, because he threw away a rock grandad picked up from Marx’s grave. In grandpa’s defense, he grew up in the 60’s Georgia (country, not the state), and studies heavily Marx-infused history in university, and life in USSR in general was heavily influenced by teachings of Marx and Lenin. While he cares little about Marx’s grave as a place (who cares about London, am I right?), it mediated a connection to his ideological icon, bringing him closer to the scholar he studied so thoroughly.
So I empathize heavily with your sentiment! Have you taken a look at Critical Terms chapters like “Memory”, “Time and Space”, or even “Materiality”? I think they could’ve helped you build a solid argument based on your experience with your evocative object.
Hi Bara!
I loved the story about your grandfather’s rock. There were 2 chapters about rocks in Turkle’s work too. I wonder what it is about rocks that makes people associate them with such heavy sentiments. Rosenblum, the author of ‘Chinese Scholar’s Rocks’ described rocks to be disorienting, which provides us some interesting food for thought. And as for the gum cans, I can relate because I tend to store such cans too.
And as for your second comment, it’s funny because those 3 were the exact same chapters I had referred to while coming up with the first draft. But then I saw the instructions mentioning that the reflection should be focused and should not attempt to incorporate too many ideas so I decided against using any more references.
Wow, I actually really loved reading this. It’s such a simple story, but there’s something really powerful in how you’ve tied this tiny rock to ideas of home, identity, and transition. I think what stood out most to me was that line about the rock being a “thread linking together different versions” of yourself, that hit hard. It perfectly captures how objects that once meant “comfort” or “home” can later come to mean “growth” and “continuity.”
Also, I like how you connected it to Turkle’s idea of liminality, it didn’t feel forced or overly academic, just naturally woven in. I feel like a lot of us international students can relate to this exact feeling of wanting to carry a small, familiar thing with us when everything else changes. It’s weirdly comforting how something so ordinary can turn into a personal anchor like that.
Overall, this was such a grounded and honest reflection, made me think about the random objects I’ve kept from home and why I’ve never really been able to throw them away either.
Thank you! I really liked the thread line as well because I had been racking my brain trying to figure out how best to convey my feelings about the rock in the present. And yeah, I agree there are a lot of factors of being an international student that makes you a serial hoarder for the most basic things.
For an object as simple as a circular rock, I thought you did a great job connecting it to theory and making it super rich of an evocative object. It’s a reminder of home, and the lack of use (like you said) wasn’t something I thought about, so I really loved reading that part. That lack of use doesn’t dim its light or create any other imperfections. I also think it’s cool that although you could find a rock anywhere in Vancouver, maybe even an extremely similar one to yours, it came from home which makes it even more special. All rocks are of this Earth, yes, but this rock in particular came from the ground you grew up on. It’s nice that you carried that with you, a piece of home, to this different chapter of your life.
Yes! I ended up editing it out, but initially I had meant to write a bit about how part of what made it so meaningful was that I was carrying around a literal piece of the earth from my home.
Speaking of Vancouver, I do have quite a few rocks that I picked up here as well. I have always liked rocks, but I only started collecting them quite recently after I realized how much this rock from India meant to me. I tend to collect rocks as keepsakes from all the different places I have visited, like some might keep dried flowers or leaves.