The Shards of Life
Many times along the paths of her life journey she had tended to miss the forest for the trees. What she had observed she had often seen as isolated and disconnected. Instead of hearing a song in the noise around her she had heard a series of clangs and vibrations. Instead of seeing a dance she had only seen a kick, and a turn of the head. A kick was just a click and a clang was just a clang.
Until now when, as a retired senior, she had enrolled in art lessons, held once a week at the local community centre. She had only completed a few pieces, as once a week wasn't really very much time to finish anything. One of her projects had been the creation of a ceramic plate. Over a few weeks she had carefully formed it from clay - fully, with her hands, and she had designed, on the plate's surface, a figure of a delicate flower, out of the softer clay.
After it had hardened in the kiln and cooled off over a period of several days, she had painted all areas of the plate with different colors of glaze, making sure that the colors went well with each other, wiping away the paint and redoing it over and over until it was perfect in her eyes.
She had had to wait a couple of weeks to get her piece fired the second time to turn the paint glaze into a glossy finish. The week that she was able to take the plate home, she had arrived at class, excited, ready to see the finished product. She had waited impatiently as students got their pieces back. Finally, the teacher approached her workspace, but just before she reached her table, in what had seemed like slow motion, her masterpiece flew out of the teacher's hands, crashing to the cold, hard tile.
Cringing, she had looked at the floor, now covered in pieces of what used to be her plate. She had tried not to show her disappointment to the teacher who was already feeling terrible about losing hold of the plate. Forcing a smile, she had assured the teacher that she would try to figure out something that she could do with all the shards of ceramic. She had picked a piece up off the floor, but could not make out which part of the plate or flower it was. One piece alone might as well have been nothing. She was defeated.
She then started to collect the rest of the shards to throw them away. She had placed them all on the table, ready to put them into the empty, hungry, taunting recycling bin. But, as the first of the pieces hit the bowels of the bin with a resounding thud, she had noticed that a thin. blue line on one of the pieces seemed to flow into a thin, blue line on the piece next to it. She picked one piece up with one hand, the next with the other. She held her hands up and brought the two pieces together. Though barely separated by a thin, jagged shadow where they had been broken apart, they were a perfect fit.
She quickly made up her mind. She grabbed the discarded pieces and began to reconstruct her new puzzle - gluing piece by piece, and by the end of the class, she had a new masterpiece. A well-loved, painfully delicate, perfectly imperfect masterpiece. It wasn't a mistake anymore. It was art. And it was whole.
Through her creative endeavor she had learned another crucial life lesson: nothing in the world can function on its own. Alone, every single thing in existence is nothing. Everything, be it a ceramic shard, a bang on a drum, the petal of a flower, or a human being, is one part of a whole. For her plate to have been reconstructed to have become complete it had to first crack into pieces. Much like life, she had realized. When, as a child, she had scraped her knee, a part of the knee was then actually missing. Throughout her life journey her heart had had to ache and yearn for many years before she found the other half of her soul. And It had taken being broken to realize what her whole entity was.
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