Down to the last few hours of 2023 – let’s start talking about an altruistic affirmation for 2024. No politics, no agendas, no polarizing social issues – let’s make 2024 better than 2023. Is that fair?
I hope so. There’s this old broken coffee cup on my desk – too broken for hot coffee – that holds my pencils and pens. I’m fond of that coffee cup, and sometimes I think it’s a great metaphor for my life. Once I explain it, maybe it’ll sound like a metaphor for you, too.
My broken coffee cup started out life with a purpose. Then it was shattered – no fault of its own. It was too valuable to throw away, too broken to continue its original journey. What do we do with the broken coffee cup? I glued it together, got it back to its more-or-less original shape and decided to honor it by making it my trusty pencil/pen holder. It’s been doing that job for about a year now and it’s doing great.
Then I started remembering an old spy novel where they used a broken ashtray to describe the intelligence-gathering process. You don’t have an ashtray unless you have all the pieces. An ashtray needs all the pieces together to be itself. I don’t smoke, so we’ll use coffee cups instead.
Cup Repair 101A
To put the cup together you need: all the pieces, glue, and some time and patience to assemble it into the right shape. A broken cup needs all the pieces before we can contemplate gluing it together. We could try pretending that it’s all there, with half the pieces missing, but that would go as far as the next time I poured hot coffee into it. All the pieces need to be together to work.
After we put the cup together – the cracks are still going to be there – the cup’s damage is part of its life. Similar to kinstugi, which treats broken pottery as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise, we’re going one step further. Sometimes we don’t have gold to put into the cracks. Other times, we have to acknowledge a painful truth. The cup’s original purpose is gone, all we can do is find a new way to express its value.
The older I get, the more I realize: people are broken coffee cups. Mental health, personal choices, bad circumstances – we all have a breaking point. We’ve all reached that breaking point, and now we’re trying to glue our pieces back together. Here’s where it gets interesting.
Some people ‘glue’ their coffee cups together in healthy ways: growth, self-care, professional help. Others mend a broken coffee cup with broken strategies: toxic ‘glues’ (Looking at you, Andrew Tate), pretending the cup is whole with half the pieces, breaking other peoples’ cups. Worse yet, some people see a mended coffee cup and take it on as a personal challenge to break them. This used to be a form of social entertainment, and more work to normalize empathy is needed, but thankfully we’re starting to turn a corner.
First and foremost – let’s just sit with the idea for a minute. One of the hardest things to do, after a life-changing problem, is to accept that things are different now. ‘Acceptance means embracing the present, understanding the extent of the loss rather than fighting it, accepting responsibility for yourself and your actions, and then starting your journey toward a new phase of life with contentment.’ So using this ‘broken coffee cup’ metaphor is about finding that acceptance for you. It’s also about helping others accept their new circumstances.
It’s not easy to be a broken coffee cup. You have to accept that things are different, you can’t pretend you’re fine. There’s a certain strength involved in admitting that you are permanently vulnerable. The wrong people won’t understand – you’ll have days where somebody’s out front going “Hey, you’re a broken coffee cup!” Those moments suck, I’m not going to lie, and we have to deal with that pain.
But for every person who can’t understand why a broken coffee cup isn’t worthless, there’s ten or maybe twenty people out there going ‘I see you. You are valuable. Your resilience inspires me and I appreciate you.’
What if we – through the power of altruism and affirmation – helped each other put our broken coffee cups together? What if we helped each other see that we’re all broken coffee cups in our own way? That’d be a powerful way to make life better for everyone, honoring the work of people like Jim Henson, Bob Ross, and Mr. Rogers.
We don’t need a quasi-spiritual context to be broken coffee cups. We can be kind because kind is the right thing to do. I hope this altruistic affirmation sets you up for success in 2024. We need all the help we can get.
