Rock on
January 1, 2026
Eyes squeezed shut, I can still feel (or at least imagine) my mom’s arms around me, drawing me close to her warmth and rocking me back and forth, back and forth. A reliable rhythm, its arc never too far in either direction. In milky, dazed contentment, I no doubt dozed off—but my eyes would have flown open the minute the rocking stopped.
I was an insomniac baby, up late at night and disdainful of naps, eager to be conscious. The rocking soothed all that away. Apparently it reminds us of the womb’s sloshing. Our mother’s breathing, heartbeat, and movement keep her amniotic fluid moving in gentle waves. Once the shock of cold air has alerted us to the world, we long to be lulled again. Since prehistory, mothers have fashioned cradles and slings to continue their internal rhythm. Rocking chairs and porch gliders let dads do some soothing, too (I am told mine fell asleep with me) until swings and rocking horses can take over.
For an infant, rocking regulates the nervous system, eases the impulse to wail, and increases oxytocin, hastening sleep and improving its quality. Science tells us that the need to be rocked starts fading when we are four months old, but I am not sure I believe it. If you have ever had a lover hold you afloat in a lake or swimming pool, you know how primal the delight is. Again, you are weightless, held safe, water lapping over you.
When I was twenty, and my mom had a heart attack I instantly assumed would be fatal, I sat alone in our condo that night, arms wrapped around my knees, rocking back and forth as I sobbed. When a friend had a bitter fight with her husband and stormed out of the restaurant, we found her a few blocks away, arms folded tightly, upper body rocking in inconsolable misery.
Children and adults on the autism spectrum rock, too. For them, the predictable movement can ease sensory overload; it can also add sensory stimuli when the mind is hungry for more. Balance restored, the resulting calm spreads through mind and body, offering a sense of control over life’s chaos. Anxiety is soothed. Excitement, which can be just as stressful, is modulated. Emotions of all kinds notch down to manageability, and it becomes easier to focus, think, and concentrate.
Rather a miracle, when you think about it.
Rocking even carries into the world of objects. Big, hard-muscled workers know how to rock an impossibly heavy object into motion. Even I know to rock a smaller object that is stuck. Rocking jars things loose; it also acknowledges the emotional stuckness of ambivalence or uncertainty. Asked for an appraisal, we rock our hand back and forth: so-so, more or less, meh.
Yet I know of no musical genre less meh than rock ’n roll.
“Rocking and rolling” first showed up in nautical songs, expressing a ship’s movement on the waves, and then in gospel music, capturing faith’s intensity. In the 1930s, though, the phrase was used in blues and R&B to mean sex, and as that music developed into early rock ’n roll, the pelvic dynamics completed the analogy.
Rock ’n roll blasts you with its confidence, the way cool people rock an outfit and anybody amazing just rocks. Rocking somebody’s world can be wonderful; it can also be threatening. They just might fall out of their cradle. The double sense has been inherent all along—rocking can be a violent motion or a soothing one. But the weirdness of “rock,” a lump of stone that just sits there, joining all this movement? A simple misunderstanding conflated the two words. “Rock” comes from rocca, a Latin word for stone. “Rocking” comes from roccian, an Old English word that means moving back and forth.
Orthodox and Hasidic Jews rock as they pray; the movement, called shuckling, helps the mind focus. Also, when a group of believers are all rocking as they pray, there is a sense of unison, even spiritual connection, as though they are all on the same rickety old bus, journeying to meet God. The Zohar, a mystical text, speaks of the soul as God’s candle, and shuckling as the flame’s constant flickering, moving upward toward its source. Other rabbis have suggested that the rocking represents the way we, encountering the divine, swing back and forth between love and awe. The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Chassidic movement, even compared shuckling to marital intimacy, saying it expressed our intense desire to connect with God.
Sex does rock us—even if there is no physical rocking, we are held and moved, excited and soothed. Rocking of any sort is a paradox: it takes us back and forth, yet we never budge from a fixed point. Beneath the blur of movement, there is stability—which is no doubt part of rocking’s comfort. Why else would we rock at our most vulnerable times? Why else would we start our life being rocked and end it in a rocking chair?
