I spy broken glass on the floor in the furnace room. The pane I slid behind some boxes and planned to repurpose for a future artistic endeavor is now lost to me. I also recall the outdoor clock by the pool I hung a handful of weeks ago. I positioned it on its nail and jumped into the water. The CRASH! onto the cement seconds later showed me a person really can kill time.
I follow a social media page about weird and wonderful secondhand finds, and recently, someone posted a photo of a broken bit of pottery they found while combing a beach on South Korea's East Sea. A transfer-printed cobalt blue tree marked the white fragment. The finder hoped to turn the piece into jewelry and asked the followers for suggestions on how to preserve it well.
I think of glass; I think of humanity.
“Why are there so many prickly people, so many sharp edges on them?” I ask myself one day.
Because they’re broken.
The answer, landing in my spirit, was a reminder. Navigating my own shards of life and everybody else’s too, I get it. I think of human brokenness now, and examples prick me.
One training requirement of my day job as an employment consultant is to listen to a mental health podcast monthly, and an episode I heard last week was on small t traumas. The word trauma is used on social media—spent on things like messed-up coffee orders, texting mistakes, wardrobe malfunctions (and more)—its true weight brushed away. But here we are with traumas of all sizes. Why? Because life has many edges for us to bump against as we walk through it. And some edges hit us.
Now an ancient story springs to mind, retold by so many cultures no one knows its true author.
An old man had two large pots, one hung on each end of the pole he carried across his neck. One pot was perfect, holding the full amount of water each day. The other was cracked, only able to carry half the water on the long walk home. The perfect pot was proud of itself; the broken pot was sad.
After years of failure, the cracked one spoke to the man. “I'm ashamed because I leak water each day on the way back home.”
“Did you notice the flowers only on your side of the path?” the man said. “I planted seeds, and every day you watered them.”
I've never seen a pane of glass, a clock, a piece of pottery, or a pot heal itself. And I know this much is true: the same goes for me.
But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.
*Has My Blonde Life inspired or entertained you? If you wish to toss a tip into my writerly coffers, here's how you can do it: @Tamara-Schierkolk (Venmo) or $TamaraSchierkolk (Cash App)
*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.