When I was in high school, my bedroom hummed like a tiny aquatic laboratory. Four aquariums lined the walls: a bustling community tank, a feisty African cichlid setup, a school of razor-quick piranhas, and my crown jewel, a saltwater reef with delicate invertebrates and impossible colors.
I didn’t just keep fish; I studied them. I filled notebooks with feeding habits, pH experiments, notes on patterns and coloration. Page after page of what looked like useless teenage obsessions, but to me, it was wonder. If you’d asked who I would become, I would’ve told you “marine biologist” without looking up from the water tests. Maybe even a pet shop owner who sold rare, hard-to-find fish to other dreamers.
And then life happened. Priorities shifted. Dreams reshaped themselves. One day the hum of the filter went quiet, and the last tank dried up.
Years later, Kristina found a forgotten little five-gallon aquarium tucked on a high laundry-room shelf like a relic from someone else’s life. She had no need for it, but she held onto it until the day she heard me reminiscing about my fish-keeping days. She handed it to me, and something old and tender opened back up.
Fast forward to now: two aquariums glow in our home, and I’m resisting the urge to sneak in a third. The hobby returned like muscle memory. Finding the right community of tank mates. Learning which plants thrive. Dialing in the chemistry, the lighting, the balance. But this time, it’s not just nostalgia. These little glass worlds have become mirrors for the inner one.
Yes, I love the ritual of sitting before the tanks with my morning coffee breathing slower, watching tiny lives move with such grace and simplicity. Beauty does that to us. It steadies our pulse. It centers us.
But aquariums are not only places of calm; they are honest teachers disguised as harmless hobbies.
Every Sunday I roll up my sleeves. I test the water. Trim the plants. Scrape algae. And then comes the unsettling part, siphoning the gravel and watching all the hidden gunk swirl up into the tube. Where did all this come from? Am I overfeeding? How does something so small create so much waste? And every time, without fail, I have that anxious thought: Did I just make things worse?
Because afterward, the tank looks messier, cloudier. Disturbed. Sometimes a bacteria bloom rolls in and the water turns milky and it feels like a step backward instead of forward. But I’ve learned something: the cloudiness isn’t failure. It’s chemistry resetting. It’s the ecosystem doing what it needs to do to stabilize again.
Aquariums taught me something I didn’t understand as a kid but can feel now: clarity almost always comes after the cloud.
Soul work is the same. It’s easy to feel like we’re growing when life is peaceful and relationships are smooth. But real growth sneaks up on us in the crises, in the misalignments, in the moments when something inside gets stirred. Turning inward means unsettling what settled at the bottom. It means confronting what has been quietly accumulating: unspoken fears, old insecurities, resentment we didn’t know we were feeding. And when we do, things get messy. Murky. Uncomfortable.
But the fog that follows honest self-reflection isn’t a sign we’re lost. It’s a sign we’re changing.
I doubt the little marbled hatchetfish or the albino bristlenose plecos in my tanks know they’re soul guides. But they are. And I’m grateful. It’s humbling when the sacred sneaks in through ordinary things, when a forgotten fish tank and a little Sunday cleanup become invitations to come home to myself.
So here’s to stirring up the gunk. To welcoming the water when it clouds. To trusting the reset on the other side.
[This post originally appeared on The Enneagram of Belonging Substack]