Beautiful Broken Glass

Living and loving and doing good work in a world always breaking our hearts.

This is something of a short excerpt from my long “Bleed, Sweat, Cry, but also Dance” newsletter the other day.

A few. years ago surf legend Kelly Slater told something after dinner at his house one night in Cocoa Beach that has echoed in my chest ever since: “You never really fix it. You just learn to accept it. And then accepting it kind of is fixing it.”

He was talking about the fucked-up parts of ourselves, the things that hurt all the time, and the things about ourselves we wish we were different.

There’s a peace that comes with that acceptance, is the point, because on the other side of that acceptance lies the simple truth that all you can do is all you can do. Twenty-two-year-old Surf legend-in-the-making Caroline Marks, after undergoing a breakdown then returning to win a world title and, now, Olympic gold, told me earlier this year: “I’m just t…