Skipping The Stones

Last night, as I was drifting toward sleep, I faced the usual decision about whether to put something on YouTube. Most nights, I avoid it. There is something quietly sacred in letting my mind rest from the constant pressure of stimuli: the demands of work, the emotional weight of parenting, the complexities of relationships, and the endless noise of the world’s narratives.

In those rare unguarded moments, when all that falls away, I slip into a kind of inner beach. I imagine myself sitting by the shoreline, picking up stones and skipping them across the water. Watching each one leap and fall is strangely calming. In the image, someone might walk by and ask, “Why are you throwing rocks?” And the answer would simply be: “Because I like how beautifully they jump.”

That question—what makes something beautiful?—lingers. The longer I looked at the image in my mind, the more I realized that the beauty isn’t in the rock, or in the arc, or even in the water. It’s in me. Or rather: the beauty I experience “outside” is inseparable from something inside.

This idea has been circling my mind for a long time: the equivalence, or at least the deep interconnectedness, between the outer world and the inner one. The revelation was simple but grounding: the “external world” I think I’m perceiving is always mediated through my senses. The world in itself may exist independently, but the world as experienced lives inside me. It is me in a very immediate sense.

Once that becomes clear, projection stops looking like a flaw or a psychological malfunction and starts appearing as the natural state of perception. If all perception is internalized—if what I call “the outside” is a field of impressions inside consciousness—then of course my inner patterns shape what I see. Not because I’m distorting reality, but because that’s the only way I can encounter it.

Beauty becomes not a property of objects but a reflection of the observer.

And love works the same way. It becomes a circuit:

• Loving the world requires loving oneself.
• Loving oneself blossoms into loving the world.
• The division between the two was artificial from the start.

What I take to be “outer” is, in some profound sense, an extension of my inner landscape. That’s why the stones skipping on the imagined water feel beautiful. Their arc traces something inside me.