We just returned from Mackinac Island where we went with the family for a summer weekend. Mackinac is a tiny, 3.8 square mile island, between the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. It’s a special place. Motorized vehicles are banned so bicycles and horses are the only transportation. The island only has 495 permanent residents, but an average of 15,000 visitors a day at peak tourist season.
In addition to eating fudge from one of the dozen fudge shops on the island, tourists *all* rent bicycles and bike around the scenic 8.2 mile state highway around the island (the only state highway without actual cars). Along the way, people stop to enjoy the shore, see the sights, and to create these little rock pillars.
How interesting. They are everywhere. There are literally hundreds of them.
What are these about? I think we all want to make our mark. We should tread lightly on the earth with lower carbon footprint and as they say on the island ‘taking only photographs, leaving only footprints’, but still we crave to matter. We crave to make our mark. So we build. We stop and make a rock pillar. We stack, we balance, we pile the stones carefully.
When working with customers I always used to say that every customer wanted two things. To be understood as utterly unique and totally typical. They wanted to know we understood them uniquely: their industry, their location, their size, their region, their culture…all of that. But they also wanted to be reassured that their struggles weren’t crazy or out-of-this-world. They wanted to know that the challenges they were experiencing weren’t so unusual and that the learning curves they were climbing were survivable (and thriveable).
We humans are all like this, I think. We want to be special and unique. We want to be reminded there is no one else like us, and indeed there isn’t. But we also want to be part of something. We want to be connected. We want to share our experiences. We want to know that the broader community is woven with us.
So we build our little rock pillars. We make our little stacks of stones and take the obligatory selfie. They look amazingly similar and unique.
They won’t last, of course. The first strong wind in northern Michigan will take them down. But we’ll rebuild them again and again as we seek to make our mark, and to matter in the world. As we seek to matter to others who are part of our community.
