Rock Hard

Your life, soul, who you are is a rock, a steadfast boulder. Perhaps you are like basalt, reflecting things around you with your unique perspective. Or perhaps, you are more like granite with colorful imperfections making your flaws beautiful. Again, your rock may be limestone with a diversity of useful applications. Your rock, whatever it is, represents the true self of your identity. When standing alone, the rock is both a symbolic representation of who you are and your actual self: malleable to an extent but extraordinarily brittle under awkward stresses. Strength lies in the beliefs that direct you toward your goals of achievement, everyday interaction, and, most relevant to this essay, the presentation of who you are in your appearance to others.
Your rock can stand alone, be independent, stand as a monolith, a marker for all to see. Pride is classically said to be green and embitter its possessor, destroying that individual's desire and ability to sympathize and forgive. Instead, think of green as representing a plant: marine algae or terrestrial grass. The green in innocent, even decorative at first, but over time it hides the true rock, your character, covering the uniqueness with the ordinary, yet complex, shades of green. The plant, for which I will claim as algae, grows drawing nutrients and cracking through the base rock, your character, and true self beneath. Should this erosional work continue, the rock will break, crack, shatter, disassemble, and collapse inwardly from the outward force. The root from the plant that is growing into you unproductively uses the nutrients that you have stored.

The algae, for I myself like to think of pride as a scum that clings, resilient to the rock's surface. When it is fresh and wet, it grows, digging into you further, and gets in the way of all else as it hides your real surface. However, when it is dry and hard, stuck tightly onto the exterior, you smell foul as the as the algae attempts to retain moisture and hibernate until needed "again." Either way the rock is hidden beneath the growth.
What can be done?
Nothing - let the algae grow, taking its toll, slight as it is. Keep in mind the order of ecological succession, for, while the algae is small and easy enough to remove, after some time, other, harder and tougher plants take root. Just as a sapling is small and unintimidating, a tree is monstrously large, heavy, and intimidating. To let the algae grow is to abandon yourself to the order of succession and surrender your nutrients to the development of a forest of outgrowth of pride and vices.
Alternatively, to remove the algae is energy intensive, annoying, and difficult. However, to remove the pride or algae while new, saves the rock from scarring and allows it to stand forth as it is truly, not hidden away spending its precious limited allotment of resources in a purposeless forest of vice.
The choice, while easily presented, is difficult. Your choice early on can be undone at any time, but the longer the wait the more impacting the nutrient-sucking roots will be and the less visible your true self will become.
Pride has been called a mask, or, perhaps, a set of scales, but I, with my interest in plants, compare my pride to that of algae: a scum that hides, stinks, digs into, and can remain forever.
It is desirable for aesthetic presentation of no kind. To remove this leech on life is daunting, but its removal leads to the highest rung of bliss and self-satisfaction achievable by the knowledge that you are all you can be.
Scrape your scum away.


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Agatha Tyche