Broken Bowls

Do you feel like this?

Then look, there are 2 things to do in his situation:
(It is again, quite simple, once you break it down)

You leave the doors as they are.
You open the doors.

Now, keep in mind, if you don’t open the doors yourself, your doors can always be opened by another person or by a shocking event (for e.g. an earthquake, a fire or an elephant walking over your cupboard).

Believe me, leaving the doors closed and looking at the bowls being stuck like this (because you are scared what happens when you open it..) is definitely not the best (long term) option.

If you choose to leave it, in the moment which the picture shows us, you can not do much.

Do you understand?
You can’t fix what isn’t broken and you can’t use your bowls either. Only when you open the doors of your cupboard you can start to deal with the consequences.

Which one are you scared of? All the broken pieces or the noise when they break?

None?
And why do you leave it closed? Lazy? Mhh.. that is a shitty excuse, sorry. Go open it. Clean up and make something out of your life. Do not leave it closed just because you are lazy.

Or, are you scared of both?
That is fine, look:
Once you are brave and you open the doors, maybe not all of them will fall down. And if they really all fall, maybe not all of them will break! Or maybe some of the broken bowls are super easy to repair. Maybe the fact that they break helps you to finally part with them?* (*Of course a bowl doesn’t have to break in order to part with it, but when it breaks we often see more clearly how much we want to keep it or whether it is also ok for us to live without the bowl.)

Maybe you have bowls that brake, which you don’t want to repair but also not say goodbye.

That is fine as well.

You can keep the broken pieces of your bowls as long as you want. Don’t worry, you can for example use them as decoration in your front yard or you could make a mosaic table?

If you want, you can keep them for the rest of your life. Who cares? Broken pieces of bowls. They don’t have much value for anybody but you. If someone is interested, they can ask you about the pieces. Then you can tell them what is behind it, or not. How you want. It is a 100% your decision.

Of course you can also get rid of all the bowls that break. You can give them away, or throw them into a lake or dispose them somewhere else. Again, you choose that.

something to clarify:

You don’t have to tell anyone that you open your cupboard or how many bowls broke when you did. Only please, when you don’t know what to do with the broken porcelain pieces or how to glue broken bowls back together, get support. Be aware that broken porcelain can be sharp and you can cut yourself.

Depending on how long your doors were closed, the plank in the cupboard may be rotten as well, which means that the cupboard also needs reparation.

So imagine this scenario:

When you don’t know how to repair a cupboard nor how to glue bowls back together or where to depose them. You will be standing there and look stupid with your broken bowls.

Luckily, there are people out there who know about shards and cupboards! People who can give you advice and help you to fix stuff up again (you can of course ask different people for advise). But reach out. Ask for help.

Yes, I can see you asking now:
“What if I want to do it all by myself and what if I don’t want to fix any bowls? What if I just put everything in my car and drive it to the dump!?”

Yes, possible. You can throw everything away. On the way back from the dump you can get new bowls and a new cupboard, then you put it in the same place and it is fixed.

Still there are some things to keep in mind If you choose this option:

You still have to throw away all the broken stuff and doing this by yourself can sometimes be harder than you expect. This also depends on how many bowls brake and the condition of your cupboard.
Sometimes getting rid of things is more work than fixing them up again.
You can still cut yourself, so it is important to know about basic first aid stuff.
It might cost more money to buy everything new compared to repairing it.
If you choose to throw everything because you don’t know how to repair things and you don’t want to ask for help. Learn it! There is enough knowledge out there to self-educate about how to repare bowls, cupboards and even the basic first aid knowledge you can learn on your own.
Lets say it happens again, that your cupboard looks like this. You need to buy everything new again, in this way you create a lot of trash plus you don’t know how to repair bowls and help others if you get asked for help.

Lets do a different scenario now

Imagine you leave your cupboard how it is in the picture but you still go and buy a new cupboard and new bowls instead. You can already see the issue about this scenario, right?

You will end up having many cupboards, many bowls and therefore you need quite some space.
Moving will become more difficult.
Having people for a visit will at one point probably become a little uncomfortable for you between all your cupboards. Because, how to explain this? “Yea.. you know, I am scared of the bowls falling thats why I leave it like this”. (Maybe then people who see this, want to help you to open the doors and offer you help with cleaning up.)

… which brings us to the last scenario:

Asking for help.
Maybe it makes you feel uncomfortable that you can not do it yourself?

Look: There are people out there who love fixing things! And I am sure, if they know about bowls and cupboards they are extremely happy to help you! You can also ask a friends or a person you feel safe for help without knowing how much they know about fixing. You can still figure it out together! You are not alone and it can be great laughing and crying over all the broken pieces! No need, to be embarrassed. Trust me, I think everyone has this situation at least once in a life time.

Do you see a little clearer by now? Once you find yourself in this situation (from the picture) in the end, it is the best to take care of it as soon as you safely can.

last but not least, this enables you to..

…be more considerate of your bowls and your cupboard. You know now that some of your bowls already broke once and you know that a cupboard can also rot over time.

When you visit other people’s homes, you suddenly understand things better and you take the bowls out of other peoples cupboards more carefully. You know, it could be that these bowls already broke once.

Maybe, over a cup of tea, the person tells you about it:

“You know,… this bowl that you are holding there in your hand, once it was broken,… but I repaired it… Do you want to know how I did that?”

This is (for example) how you learn. Not every bowl is repaired in the same way. The more bowls you see break, the wiser you become. In the end, you can repair them all.

HEADS UP:

Even if you know how to repair broken bowls and cupboards, it can still be hard to stand in front of a pile of broken pieces and have a broken cupboard on top of that. That’s why it is always good to have someone, who stands next to you and helps you to pick up the pieces and maybe also helps to put them back together or to sort them out.

There are techniques for opening cupboards completely on your own, but you need to be very careful and be aware that this bowls will comes toward you most likely pretty strong and pretty fast. In all honesty it is possible to open it yourself, but it is important to know who you can turn to in an emergency, if you suddenly need a helping hand.

In case of desperation: Never be afraid to ask (about all of this.. and more!) We can only grow if we learn and only learn if we ask. Or do you know someone who explains you exactly the things you want to know without asking about it? You can see how small this chance is no?

So: Prepare yourself.
Ask and then open your cupboard.

Think about how nice it will look when everything is sorted and tidy (again). Some of the bowls will still serve to feed you and some will be repurposed and you will only look at them from a distance, depending on what you decide to do with them.

It can be that you have bowls which will never be whole again, even though you want them to. That, my love, is called “life”.
We don’t have everything under control and yet, more than we think. Breaking something is one thing. Repairing it, is the other. I hope you can understand that standing still is … only a short term solution not a way of living and in the end you are the one who has to take action.

The bowls are only metaphors, I assume you are smart enough to understand this. Still always feel free to ask, if something is unclear to you.

With the best of luck,
Wanda