Shattered Glass
It was a usual morning in my household—one filled with lots of energy and movement. We all get up around the same time, so there can be a lot of activity happening in a fairly small space. Like a football team, we're all studying our playbooks and figuring out our routes for the day, except one thing to note, we're all playing on different fields. On this team, I'm clearly the quarterback, so I'm faced with the job of managing the routes for five different players, including myself. There is no formal huddle—no moment where we come together as a unit to coordinate our individual games. Instead, it's just me calling plays from the sideline while everyone's already in motion, trying to keep track of who needs what and when, all while preparing for my own game.
Being the quarterback for five different people—one being myself—means I'm playing for five different teams and looking for wins on five different fields. Needless to say, it can make for a busy morning. Keeping everyone's routes straight looks like signing various forms from school, preparing game-day fuel by making lunches, motivating players with the reminders they need for a successful game, keeping an eye on the time clock, organizing social plans, offering more reminders or words of wisdom, and strategizing the play of after-school activities. Quarterbacking can be demanding, to say the least. I'm throwing passes to several receivers on multiple fields while trying to plan and understand my own routes for the day—all with an eye on bringing home the win. Sometimes I look at the clock and feel the frazzies start to creep in before 8 AM.
In the past, I would stay in the lane of frazzled feelings, thoughts, energy, and focus until the very end of the day. The residual effects of operating in such a split-minded fashion would bake in right up until the very moment I went to bed. Even when I had some time to zone out and watch TV, I felt like I couldn't really settle down or feel relaxed with my energy scattered everywhere. As a result, my rest and sleep took the same form as the start of my day: broken and in pieces.
I remember heading out that morning to run the many routes I had planned for myself that day when I realized I hadn't even looked in the mirror yet. Sure, I wasn't going to walk the red carpet, but a quick glance to see if I had toothpaste on my face, a booger in my nose, or sleep wrinkles on my cheek is far from vain. I arrived at the gym in a rush and quickly jumped out of the car. As I walked toward the front door, I felt annoyed that it hadn't occurred to me to look at myself in the car when I was in the car—a perfectly reasonable and private place—but at this point I was running late and didn't want to go back. As I walked to the entrance of the gym, I recalled seeing one of my teen girls use their phone as a mirror once. Perfect, I thought. I quickly opened my camera and took a peek. No toothpaste, no sleep wrinkles. Touchdown. Or so I thought.
As I looked at my shattered and cracked screen protector, I noticed its geometric webbing of sharp edges and shapes across the screen. I had been meaning to change it out, but—as silly as this sounds—I didn't have it scheduled in the playbook, and therefore I didn't account for it as a play.
I stopped walking for a minute. I realized that this shattered phone screen protector was a mirror image of not only how I looked in its jagged frame, but a reflection of how I felt: frazzled and fragmented. It dawned on me that when I'm in this state of the frazzies, I feel like I have to keep everything together. I have to keep the game moving forward while holding the responsibility for everyone's success: the playbooks, the routes, the to-do lists, the work, the balls in the air, the plates spinning, the browsers open, and the world turning, and this energy carries through to everything I'm doing, even when it's something I truly enjoy, like going to the gym. I realized that moving through the world in this frazzled state will not only carry that momentum forward, but it will influence every pass I throw. Being in that state creates pass interference all day long and affects everything I do and how my day unfolds: incomplete, broken, and shattered. It produces hard lines and sharp edges and, most importantly, a distorted view of what is.
The truth is that yes, I need to quarterback right now. That's my role, my part, and I'm more than happy to do it—I'm grateful. But what isn't true is that I need to move through the world with a distorted view, feeling frazzled and fragmented in such a way that it influences my plays for the day.
No, we can't offload everything in order to find equanimity or stop the game clock. We can't prevent everyone from running their routes just because we're overwhelmed. But what we can do is start to understand what's needed in order to do all the things we need to do without splitting into a million pieces. We can find and use moments that will balance us out by bringing in stillness, release, or whatever we need. We can find value in the moments in between the big plays.
When we can't meditate for 20 minutes or do the exact thing we want to do that makes us feel whole, we can quickly shift our view when we're feeling fragmented. We can take a breath or two or ten to settle down. We can balance on one foot to change the neural pathway we're in. We can stop and look around to recenter ourselves by tuning into our five senses. We can slow down for a moment and focus on what's happening right in front of us rather than letting everything flood us all at once.
The game doesn't have to stop for us to find our footing. We don't need a formal huddle to remember that even quarterbacks get to take a knee, reset, and choose their next play with intention rather than reaction. Sometimes the most powerful play we can call is simply pausing long enough to see clearly—through an unshattered lens—exactly what's in front of us. Because when we move from that centered place, every pass we throw has the potential to be a perfect spiral, connecting us more fully to the life we're actually living rather than just trying to manage.
Hi, I’m Sara Rose.
Explore my blog to uncover the extraordinary transformations hidden in everyday moments.
