I broke a bowl the other day.
I had it sitting on my breakfast counter, and when I went to move it to make room for something else, it simply slipped out of my hand — I felt it slip through my fingers a split second before it happened and my heart went, Ohno — and then, *prriaak*: shards all over the kitchen floor.
Luckily it was ceramic, not glass so it broke into one big piece and 12-15 smaller, easily salvageable pieces, and random ceramic dust.
I collected the bigger fragments and swept up the bits — should have thrown it all away but I didn’t.
Instead, I binned the tiny bits and set the bigger pieces aside to fix another day.
Why?
I don’t know, really.
It’s not like the bowl cost a lot in terms of money — I think I swapped a plate of chicken curry and cumin rice for this + 2 other bowls at a trueque1, which means a) someone else had already got some use out of it before it came to me, and b) most people would put its monetary worth at about $1.
It definitely didn’t have any sentimental value to me.
I have a bunch of other bowls that fulfill the same purpose that this one does.
So… by most assessments, I should have thrown it all away and be done with it.
But I didn’t.
Instead, a few days later, I set about piecing it together with (not food-safe) superglue.
As I sat there piecing this random, kinda “worthless” bowl together (and getting superglue all over my fingers in the attempt), I got to thinking.
What does this bowl really cost?
Sure, the price we put on it might be a dollar but is that really the cost of it?
Somewhere on this planet, there is a hole, a gap in existence, where this bowl’s material, earth, clay, used to be.
Perhaps some grass, trees, shrubs, toadstools, ants, worms, birds, mice, snakes used to call that space home.
Some other animals lived off the other lifeforms that used to call that space home and now have to look elsewhere for sustenance.
Some people, somewhere gathered — with their hands or with machines — the material that went into making this bowl.
Someone, some people, somewhere designed this bowl.
Some people worked the machines that processed this material, shaped it, fired it into becoming a bowl.
Other people packed it, shipped it, transported it across miles, perhaps thousands of miles, and brought it here.
Where yet other people unpacked it, placed it on shelves, smiled at checkout, put it in a bag, and handed it over to the customer.
And the people who bought it — they worked hard, doing whatever it is they do to earn some amount of money to be able to buy this bowl.
Only to one day bring it to the trueque and hand it over to me.
Is this bowl still only worth a dollar?
Maybe it is.
Or maybe there’s something profoundly wrong with how we assign value to the things we have in our lives.
Because there is a greater cost — one that we don’t see — if all we do is look at the price tag.
Should we value things more?
If we really took a second to think about how much time, energy, effort, resources — and I’m not just talking about money — goes into each and every single thing that we have surrounding us, would we not see this same journey that my broken blue bowl took?
This computer I’m typing this on, this mobile device you’re reading it on, the glasses you use to read, the sweater you’re wearing to keep you warm, the air conditioner that’s keeping you cool, the roof above your head the floor beneath your fear in those fancy shoes.
Heck, even the food we eat.
Do you know how long it takes to grow a head of lettuce?
How much time, and energy, and effort it takes?
And half of it ends up in the noisy monster in your sink or the compost box on your window sill.
Without a second thought.
Now, my aim is not to guilt you into… anything.
It is simply to point out that a lot more goes into producing things that we often give a moment of thought to.
And perhaps we would all do well to be aware of this before doing something so simple as throwing away a broken blue bowl.
What would our world look like if we valued things more?
I’m not saying we need to assign an arbitrarily higher value to things so that a blue bowl now costs $100.
I’m simply wondering out loud — what would happen if we afforded each thing we encounter in our lives the respect and care commensurate to the amount of time, energy, effort, and resources it took to bring them into existence?
In our not-too-distant past, it was unthinkable to throw something away simply because it was broken or torn or not in its perfect state.
A shirt with a hole.
Grab a needle and some thread and mend it.
Another hole. Mend it again.
And again and again and again,
until the shirt is more held together with patches than the original fabric,
then use that shirt to patch other pieces of clothing till you can’t anymore,
then it becomes a rag or finds some other purpose,
before it is finally consigned to the bin (maybe).
I think I read an Enid Blyton story once about a beloved and cherished shirt that eventually found its way (in the form of fabric scraps) to the nest of a mouse where it kept little mouse babies warm and snug through the winter.
I might be making this up. But the point stands.
If we don’t throw things out at the first sign that they’re no longer what they were when we purchased them, would we not get so much more use out of things?
And would we then not need fewer things?
And because we need fewer things, we need less money, and could work less?
And because we worked less, we would have more time to do other things that we truly did want to do?
Things like paint, or walk in the sunshine, or cook for our loved ones, or go swimming in the ocean, or simply take a nap in a hammock?
And because we did these things, we started realizing that we didn’t need all those things to be happy, we really didn’t.
All because we fixed a broken blue bowl.
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I’ll write more about the trueque (barter market) in a future post, perhaps.
It looks beautiful now!