I’d Like a Life Like Sea Glass

Pink, blue, green, white — perhaps even red.

Have you ever noticed how sea glass has the ability to look so unique, so beautiful?

Smoothed by the battering it has taken on many tides, yet somehow it always arrives, peacefully laid to rest upon the shore.

How did it come to be here?

What story could it tell us, if only it could speak?

I am fascinated by journeys.

Perhaps that is why sea glass reminds me so much of life.

There have been times in my own life when I haven’t felt smoothed by the tide.

I have felt broken by it.

Times when being everything to everyone left so little of me that I wondered where the woman I once was had gone.

We become so good at carrying the titles life gives us.

Mother. Wife. Daughter. Friend. Provider. Carer.

We organise. We remember. We fix. We accommodate. We keep going.

And somewhere amongst all that doing, it is frighteningly easy to lose sight of ourselves.

Perhaps that is why I am drawn to sea glass.

Because when I pick up that tiny shard from the sand, I don’t look at its imperfect edges and wonder what is missing.

I don’t ask why it isn’t still the thing it used to be.

I simply think it is beautiful.

And yet how often do we look at ourselves and do exactly the opposite?

We remember the woman we once were.

The woman before responsibility became heavy.

Before disappointment.

Before loss.

Before life taught us lessons we never asked to learn.

We look back at her and sometimes mistake different for better.

We wonder where she went.

Perhaps we even mourn her.

But would I really want to become her again?

Would I give back everything the tides have taught me simply to return to the woman who stood at the beginning of the journey?

I don’t think I would.

Because she may have been less weathered, but she also knew less.

She hadn’t yet discovered how deeply she could love.

How much she could carry.

How many times she could begin again.

She didn’t yet know that some things she thought would break her would instead change her.

And perhaps that is what I have misunderstood about sea glass.

It is beautiful precisely because it isn’t what it used to be.

Nobody finds a piece of sea glass washed upon the shore and thinks,

What a shame. This used to be something else.

We pick it up.

We turn it over in our hands.

We notice its colour, its softness, its imperfections.

We treasure what it became.

Why, then, is it so difficult to offer ourselves the same grace?

Our lives can become so overwhelmed by plans and organisation that we feel beaten and cracked simply trying to accommodate the expectations and needs of everyone around us.

We convince ourselves that if we could just organise things better, work harder, anticipate the next problem or control the next tide, perhaps life would finally become easier.

But what if we could pause the world for just a second?

What if, for that moment, we didn’t need to know the next step?

Imagine the pressure being released.

Imagine simply breathing.

Perhaps some of the cracks we carry aren’t caused by the tides at all, but by the pressure we place upon ourselves to know where they are taking us.

Sea glass doesn’t know where the next tide will leave it.

Neither do we.

And perhaps we aren’t supposed to.

We so often look at our own lives and see only the grey.

The ordinary.

The mistakes.

The things that didn’t happen.

The things we wish we had done differently.

Meanwhile we look towards somebody else’s shore and imagine their tides have somehow been kinder.

Yet from the outside, our own lives may look completely different.

Where we remember the battering, someone else may see strength.

Where we remember the uncertainty, they may see courage.

Where we see an ordinary woman simply doing what needed to be done, somebody else may see a woman who survived things they aren’t sure they could have survived themselves.

Maybe gratitude begins when we stop comparing ourselves with the pieces scattered further along the shore and finally look at the one resting in our own hand.

Not gratitude for every storm.

Not gratitude for everything that hurt.

But gratitude for the woman who emerged from them.

Because every piece of sea glass has her own story to tell.

And every mark, every softened edge, every tiny imperfection is evidence that there was a journey before she arrived upon this shore.

So, indeed, I would like a life like sea glass.

The tides of change may be rough. They may cut, tumble and turn me in circles.

But I no longer want to return to the woman I was before the tide.

I want to treasure the woman it created.

Polished.

Carved.

Shaped by life.

Still here.

And now resting, like sea glass upon the shore — blessed by the process, grateful for the experience and proud to be my unique self.