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 taking care of me, and honestly doing the best I can, [and so] what other people say doesn’t matter.”
You’re gonna bleed and sometimes the bleeding is necessary but not as often as we might think, and just as necessary are the things like wine and butter cake and dancing. Especially the dancing.
Life will break us all and everything good and everything bad that has ever happened to us folds into whatever’s next, all so many waves rolling into the sand and back out to sea with the tides.
Everything that happens will pass, everything that happens will last forever, and all we can really do is live every moment in full.
It reminds me of that Buddhist proverb about the beautiful glass. You’ve probably heard it: A student asks a master how he can be happy in a world in which everything is temporary, in which the people we love get hurt or sick or killed, in which our hearts are constantly broken.
The master holds up a glass and says that someone he loves who is gone now gave him that glass, and that it is an excellent glass, good at holding water, beautiful in the light of the sun, and it even creates a striking ringing sound when he touches it just so. And one day the wind might blow it over or he might knock it off the table by mistake and the glass will be shattered beyond repair, forever. “I know this glass is already broken,” the master says, “so I enjoy it, incredibly.”