A Valuable Lesson

Q:  What does a 7th grade student and an inanimate object have in common?

A:  The teaching of a valuable lesson.

The pictures below juxtaposed show the dichotomy of our days, at least my days much of the time.  In the first picture you see the fragmented remains of what is clearly a wonderful mug, certainly one of my favorites.  The story of its demise will be left for another day.  Suffice it to say that the fall and subsequent break happened in slow motion, and left my heart equally fractured.  Well, maybe  there's a little bit of hyperbole in that last part, but I was definitely bummed out.

The look on people's faces when they saw the mug lying in pieces on my desk was also one of empathetic sorrow.  People felt my pain. Many of them suggested that I glue the mug back together.  Gorilla glue works miracles you know.  But my immediate and sustained response was simply, "That will never work, there are too many pieces."  Whether I spoke it, thought it, or said it with my facial expressions, I believed that my favorite mug was beyond repair.

That was the first half of my day.  The second half was entirely different.


A certain seventh grader strolled into my office and noticed the ceramic remains lying in a heap.  After a moment of shock and sadness, she said what the others before her had said, "Why don't you just glue it back together?"  Of course, my reply was the same: "That will never work, there are too many pieces."

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Before long I noticed that she had not taken my word for it.  Indeed, she had not taken my statement of fact as fact at all.  Instead, she went to work on fixing the problem.  


Life can probably not be over simplified any more than this.  We blow it, we break something, we botch something up only to believe that it can never be repaired.  Even after others offer suggestions on how the something might be mended, we refuse to listen.  We would rather wallow in our negativity and disbelief.


Quite often it takes another person to actually do the thing we claim cannot be done before our eyes are opened to the possibility.  


I preach possibility on a daily basis, and yet, apparently, there are still times when I need to see it on display in someone else before I believe . . . and therein lies the valuable lesson.

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