Broken Glass, and the Thing within the Thing

I went through a phase where I was buying a lot of fancy glasses for my cocktail creations.  Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m still in that phase and probably will be for a while.

But there was a problem: I kept breaking glasses. 

It was more out of clumsiness than excessive consumption (so I tell myself), but it was making me frustrated.  One time I placed a coup glass in my freezer (pre-chilling is a must!) and later broke it when opening the freezer door.  I was angry because I had lost another and now had a mess of glass pieces to clean up.

As I was cleaning in anger I recalled a concept that I was recently introduced to called “the thing within the thing.”  It can refer to recognizing the true thing that is going on beneath the noise of an event, or it can also refer to seeing new possibilities when something has not turned out the way it was expected to.

I stared at the broken glass with its base and stem still intact, and I liked the way it looked.  I decided then that it would be a piece of art. I took a photo of it with my phone and then put it on a shelf as a reminder.

This reminder served me well a couple weeks later when my car’s windshield was hit by a fallen bullet.  I was angry to discover it and have to pay $400 to get it replaced. 

But as I drove my damaged car that day, I had a brief moment where I saw a certain beauty in the way the sun reflected off the cracks, something I had never seen before in a healthy windshield.  So I paused, took a photo, and decided it would be a piece of art.

(Bonus photo: a water main break in my neighborhood led to some flooding of the streets)