The Gift of Fragility
Last month, after seeing a movie, I came out of the theater to find the rear bumper on my new car—it had only 5,000 miles on it—cracked right through. I had been enjoying its shiny black newness and was trying to take extra good care of it. But there it sat, a gash in the rear bumper, split open, no longer pristine. I am not very attached to things. Plus, I was going to fix it, so no one would be able to see that something had happened. But still, I knew it wasn’t going to be the same as it was. And for perhaps five minutes I felt the loss.
As I drove home, I remembered one of my favorite Buddhist stories about a forest monk in Thailand, Ajahn Chah. He was the teacher for several American Buddhists in the 1970s who later founded the Insight Meditation Society, in Barre, MA. The story goes that one day, as Ajahn Chah was discussing Buddhist ideas with other monks, nuns, and lay students he pointed to the tea cup he was using and said: “I love this glass. It holds my tea so admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. This is my favorite glass, but I do not cling to it, because to me this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf, and it falls to the ground and shatters, I will say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.”
This story speaks to both the fragility of life and everything we love as well as the preciousness of everything. In fact, perhaps it is the fragility that makes things precious. Of course, it isn’t only human life that is fragile, but every object, everything we love, everything we depend on. In an instant, our lives can change. No matter what we do or how much we try to protect ourselves and the things we love, inevitably something will happen to shatter our favorite tea cup, crack the bumper of our new car, end an intense love, or cause our body to decline. We can hate this inevitability or we can fully embrace it.
The words of Ajahn Chah are a classic, although unusual example of reframing. While he anticipates the destruction of his favorite tea glass, he is using that to see that he must enjoy looking at its shape every time he notices it on the shelf, at the way the light bounces off its surface, and the taste of every sip of tea it allows him.
What if we were to take his example into the dying process. When we look at someone dying, instead of being consumed by sadness and anticipated grief, what if we were to embrace their fragility. To use it to inspire a deep appreciation for the look in their eyes when we truly connect, the delight in caressing their face as we gently wash their body, the preciousness of each word of love and remembrance we share. This would totally reframe our experience of their dying.
Of course, maintaining this attitude isn’t easy. But we can start to cultivate it right now in our lives. If from time to time we pause to deeply appreciate the beauty of an object we love, the smile on someone’s face, the sound of a parent’s voice on the telephone. These little acts of observation through the lens of fragility, will help us when the time comes to embrace an anticipated loss or death that looms much larger in our lives.