No Flaws Need A Reason

A new take on the old parable of the cracked pot — and why our flaws don't need to earn their place through some hidden purpose. They're simply ours.

An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole which she carried across her neck. One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walks from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

This went on daily for two years with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments but the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection and miserable that it could only do half of what it had been made to do.

After two years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream. “I am ashamed of myself because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house.”

The old woman smiled, ‘Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path and every day, while we walk back, you water them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are there would not be this beauty to grace the house.”

For years this story gets told as one about hidden purpose with the crack as a flaw that turned out, secretly, to be a gift. There's another way to look at it. 

The cracked pot spent two years comparing itself to the pot beside it. Same pole, same shoulders carrying them, same journey each morning. And every day it measured itself against something it was never built to be. That comparison was the real leak rather the water and joy.

The flowers were there all along. The cracked pot just couldn't see them because it was too busy looking sideways at the other pot instead of down at its own path.

What is a flaw, anyway? The word only exists because something else was measured first and set as the standard. A pot without a crack is not more true to being a pot - it is simply a different pot. Call the crack a flaw and you have already decided, before looking closely, that the whole pot was meant to be uniform. How often do we do that in our lives? At work, in the gym, in the bedroom, anywhere and everywhere...

Our flaws don't secretly serve some hidden purpose that redeems them. They're just ours. The crack doesn't need to be justified by the flowers it grows. It's simply part of how this particular pot moves through the world, alongside a 'perfect' pot moving through the world in its own different way and neither one more whole than the other.

Comparison is the thing that turns a difference into a deficiency. Take it away, and there's just a pot with a crack in it, doing what it does, in its own particular shape and way.

We're not each other. We were never meant to carry water the same way, live our lives exactly the same way. The things that make us specifically ourselves, including the cracks, are exactly what make each of us unique - and what make a life among other lives so rich to be part of.

As its says on the front page of my website...Comparison is the thief of joy. 

Until the next time.

Enjoy the day you create.

Martin