The Glass Didn’t Break

The other day I dropped a glass into the kitchen sink, and there was that split second when I knew exactly what was coming next: the crash, the broken glass and the slight annoyance at myself.

Except none of it happened.

The glass bounced.

I picked it up, slightly surprised that it had survived, put it away and carried on with my day, and it got me thinking about how many things go right in an ordinary day that we hardly ever notice.

You leave the house expecting traffic, and somehow every light turns green. You turn the key, and the car starts. You flick a switch, and the light comes on. Your suitcase appears on the airport carousel. 

Nobody writes home about these things, and nobody gathers the family around the dinner table and announces, “You’ll never believe what happened today. The toaster worked again!”

We expect things to work, so when they do, we barely notice.

Let’s do something similar with people.

Someone holds the door for us, a stranger lets us into traffic, the person making our coffee smiles and actually waits for the answer when they ask how our day is going, or a friend sends a message at exactly the right moment. Someone laughs at our terrible joke, a conversation goes better than expected, or a child waves at us for absolutely no reason.

Tiny things, really, and yet when you begin adding them together, you realise that an extraordinary amount of ordinary goodness is happening around us all the time.

Perhaps the problem is not that goodness is absent but that we have become very good at noticing everything else.

Think about buying a red car, and suddenly the roads seem to be full of red cars. They were always there. You just weren’t looking for them.

I wonder how much of life is like that.

If I expect people to disappoint me or the world to be frightening and hopeless, I will find plenty of evidence. But if I begin paying attention to generosity, kindness, beauty, laughter, grace and things quietly going right, I begin seeing those too.

This isn’t about pretending everything is wonderful. Some glasses really do smash, some people hurt us, and some seasons of life are incredibly difficult.

But those things aren’t the whole story either.

Perhaps one of the practices of living a healthy life is simply learning to notice the whole story.

So this week, notice the green light, the working toaster, the unexpected kindness, the good conversation, the person who makes you laugh and, of course, the glass that somehow didn’t break.

And perhaps at the end of each day, ask yourself one simple question:

What happened today that was good, but I nearly didn’t notice?

There may be much more than you think.