(This post was originally published about three years ago. I felt with all we're dealing with currently it was time to share it again. If this feels like a "broken" time to you, hang on. Life can still be beautiful.)
Today I want to tell you the story of my little Bluebird of Happiness.
Lovely, isn’t it? Imagine it sitting on the kitchen windowsill catching the light just right and refracting it out for anyone near to see. Makes my heart happy just thinking about it. It’s even lovelier when I recall it was a birthday gift from a dear friend, a woman who has known the heat of the refiner’s fire and has come through her challenges with a wise heart and a peaceful smile. She knows what it takes to be truly, genuinely happy. When she gave it to me, it was a reminder to notice happiness when it’s easy to see and to choose happiness when it’s easy not to.
Knowing the back story of this sweet token, you can accurately guess at my heartbreak the day I accidentally knocked it from the windowsill and watched as it crashed to the hard tile floor. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to my little bird. It had become a beautiful touchstone reminding me daily to see the good in my life and the world. And there it was in pieces at my feet.
For most of my life I have been, as Brene Brown puts it, a Life-is-messy-Clean-it-up type of person. Naturally, when I looked at my bird in pieces on the floor, my first instinct was to get out the dust pan and broom, clean it up, toss it in the trash, tell my heart to get over it, and move on.
But thankfully I had a flash of inspiration in that moment. This was it. I’m not a happy person because I’ve had a perfect, unbroken life. I’m a happy, optimistic person mostly because of the times Life has dropped me on the floor, so to speak, and I’ve found a way to put myself back together. Suddenly, this simple piece of blue blown glass became even more precious to me. I gathered all the pieces I could find and glued it back together.
It’s easy to see there’s crack running down the wing where it broke off, and part of the tail feather is missing. If you look closer, you can tell part of the beak is gone and there are fissures in several places. It’s far from the perfection it used to be, but it’s still beautiful. And I love it even more because of that.
Life is messy. And much of the beauty of our lives is because of that, not in spite of it.
There are other lessons this keepsake has taught me, too. It’s been broken twice: once by me, once by a friend. The lesson here is that sometimes we “break” ourselves through our mistakes, negligence, or simple carelessness. Sometimes we’re “broken” by the words or actions of others. Either way, with some work we can be okay.
Another lesson comes from the fact that both of the pictures in this post were taken on the same day. In the one taken from a distance, it’s hard to see the imperfections. It’s only when we zoom in that we see the breaks and cracks. We can learn two things from this: first, if we keep our life in proper perspective, it’s much easier to see the beauty of the whole thing. Second, it’s important to remember we see other people’s lives from a distance and because of that, we may think we see perfection when in reality we’re just not close enough to see the cracks earned by the trials they’ve overcome.
Remember, happiness is a choice, and "perfect" does not equal happy.
If you don’t happen to have a little Bluebird of Happiness of your own to remind you of these things, feel free to borrow mine.