In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. –Martin Luther King, Jr
A couple of weekends ago, the four of us loaded ourselves into the car after a morning at the beach. The Husband threw the Hyundai into reverse, and approximately one second later, the loudest of smashes reverberated throughout the car. The boys yelped and I whipped around, my brain registering emergency before I could discern what had actually occurred. But when I did…
TH had backed straight into a cement overhang in the car park, and our back windshield (windscreen in Australian) was shattered in place, thousands of tiny cracks uniting to form one massive disaster.
Reader, I had to smile.
For one, we were all in one piece and no one was bleeding. For another–bigger–reason? In my mind, all of my boneheaded car mishaps (who can forget the kerb-smashes of ’18 and ’19, or the truck-in-a-carpark-laceration of ’19 (’19 was a busy year, sue me?) were immediately and completely redeemed, and my future ones forgiven. I was free from once and future guilt, and my soul opened up to greet that freedom.
Using suspiciously passive language (“I can’t believe that happened;” “That cement came from nowhere and hit us“), TH marvelled over his mistake for a few hours (ie, until the mobile windscreen replacement unit could arrive at our house and repair it in 30 minutes). But until then, the boys and I occasionally looked over our deck down at the shattered glass parked below on our driveway, and we marvelled at that. It was awful, and strangely beautiful, this web of connected brokenness.
I’m starting to think that we’re only as connected as we are in touch with our own brokenness. Which is to say, we connect with people who are as aware of their own wounds and flaws as we are (or, as it may be, as unaware). People who see as an attainable metaphor the Japanese art of kintsugi (filling broken lines of pottery with a golden adhesive that enhances and beautifies them), or those who look for scraps of material to hide those cracks.
Once again, I highly recommend therapy.
I also recommend autism. The other day, The Kid articulated what it feels to be overwhelmed to such a degree of eloquence that I realized that the way he’s so easily overwhelmed makes him more human than so many of us, because honestly? Right now? If you’re not overwhelmed then you’re just not paying attention.
While I’m at it, may I recommend curiosity? Which truly is a byproduct of all of the above. George Saunders, author of one of the most haunting, troubling, and beautiful books I’ve ever read, writes, “What a story is ‘about’ is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.” If I’m not curious, then I’m not fully caring–or fully alive. But curiosity costs. It forces us to confront, and reach within, our brokenness and even the shame that grows best in darkness.
The cost of not being curious, though? Is that the shame keeps thriving in the darkness, and what’s required not to deal with it grows too: that thing called shamelessness. And the shameless, they attract people who aren’t in touch with, haven’t dealt with, their own shame. (And this leads to certain election outcomes, but that’s a story for another day.)
There is so much of the boys’ childhood that has already slipped from the recesses of my memory, but what I’ve never managed to lose are the memories of every waiting room I ever inhabited as one of them sat in an office or an operating theatre or a procedure room, having their weak spots strengthened or broken parts repaired. They emerged with gold lines and scars and stories, and I emerged knowing that it’s these spots that hold the most glory. The spots it takes risk to go into, and grace to get out of. Those waiting rooms were not centres of accomplishment for me, but moments under the knife myself. Helpless, and held.
We’ve been spending time nearly every day at the beach as the days grow longer and the temperature rises, and last weekend we all finally rode the waves together at the surf beach, the one without a harbour, the water that takes risk to venture into. At one point I went in on my own and emerged from a wave with a lost hair elastic and a nose full of water. I looked around, surrounded as I was by people who were either brave or desperate enough to keep going into the cold and the choppiness, and each face returned my own goofy grin. This shared experience of being tossed about, slammed into, and picked up, over and over, and always landing back at the shore, together.