The Pebbles We Carry: Kindness, Mental Health and Counselling in Cornwall
You might have spotted one of these somewhere.
A little painted pebble, left on a wall, beside a path, on a bench or somewhere waiting to be found.
Usually there are only a few words on it.
You matter.
You are enough.
It started as something quite simple. But the more pebbles I've left, the more I've found myself thinking about the person who might eventually pick one up.
Because the truth is, we walk past people every single day without knowing what they're carrying.
The person beside us in the supermarket might be grieving.
Someone smiling as they walk past us might be desperately lonely.
The person who seems to have everything together might be using every bit of energy they have just to keep going.
Most of the time, we simply don't know.
And perhaps that's why these tiny messages have come to mean something more to me.
The pebbles we carry
I've started to think of them as more than just pebbles.
Perhaps we all carry an invisible collection of our own.
Some are heavy - the things people have said to us, the losses we've experienced, the worries we're carrying, the anxiety that follows us around, and the difficult days that have stayed with us.
But there can be other pebbles too.
A kind word. Someone noticing us. A conversation where we felt genuinely heard. An unexpected message. A stranger reminding us that we matter.
None of those things magically removes the heavier stones. That's not how life works.
But perhaps we can add something alongside them.
We know that small, positive moments of connection and kindness can accumulate. They don't have to be enormous gestures to matter.
And I think that's what I love most about leaving these pebbles.
We never really know what someone is carrying
I don't know what someone's invisible collection looks like when they find one.
I don't know what they're carrying that day.
Perhaps someone will find You matter on a day when they don't particularly feel that they do.
Perhaps You are enough will be picked up by somebody who has spent years believing they aren't.
Or perhaps someone having a really difficult day will simply find a little reminder, left there by a complete stranger, that there is kindness in the world.
I'll probably never know who finds most of them.
I'll never know what was happening in their life that day, whether they smiled, took it home, left it for somebody else or barely gave it another thought.
And that's okay.
Because kindness doesn't always need to know where it lands.
We can't always take away the stones someone else is carrying.
But we can sometimes give them something gentler to carry alongside them.
And perhaps that's part of why normalising conversations about mental health matters so much to me, both personally and in my work as a counsellor.
We shouldn't have to wait until somebody's load has become unbearable before we talk about how they're feeling. Sometimes being noticed, being heard, or having somebody make space for what we're carrying can matter more than we realise.
So I'll keep painting them.
And I'll keep leaving them in little corners of Cornwall and around the UK for people to find.
Because none of us ever really knows when somebody might need to stumble across them.
You matter.
Karen Spooner - www.karenspoonertherapy.co.uk
Counselling in Hayle and Camborne, and online and telephone across the UK.
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