When Glass Breaks, Truth Speaks: A Journey Through Shattered Perceptions
There's a moment in everyone's life when something shatters. Not physically—though sometimes that happens too—but internally. A belief. An assumption. A carefully constructed version of reality that we've been staring at for so long, we forgot it was just glass.
I stood at the edge of the lake last autumn, wearing my best green suit. The kind you wear when you want to convince the world—and yourself—that everything is under control. The water stretched before me like a mirror, reflecting trees that had begun their slow surrender to winter. Everything looked perfect. Orderly. Exactly as it should be.
But perfection, I've learned, is often just another word for blindness.
The sky that evening burned an impossible shade of pink, the kind that makes you question whether you're seeing things correctly. And perhaps that was the first crack—that moment of doubt when your senses tell you something your mind refuses to accept. We spend so much time looking at the world through our expectations that we forget to simply see.
What does it mean to truly see? Not with our eyes, which can be fooled by shadows and light, but with something deeper. That inner vision that recognizes truth even when it wears an uncomfortable face. The kind of seeing that requires us to look past the surface, beyond the reflections, into the substance beneath.
I think about this often now. How many times have I walked through life with my head intact but my vision fractured? How many times have I been so concerned with maintaining appearances—the pressed suit, the confident stride, the unwavering certainty—that I missed what was actually happening around me and within me?
The truth is, sometimes we need something to break before we can see clearly. Not our spirits—those should remain intact, resilient, faithful. But the glass through which we view the world. The assumptions. The comfortable illusions. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what matters.
When glass shatters, it doesn't destroy the view. It transforms it. Suddenly, what we saw as one continuous reality reveals itself as fragments—each piece reflecting light differently, each angle offering a new perspective. The tree is still a tree. The water is still water. But now we see them not as we expect them to be, but as they actually are.
There's something profoundly humbling about this realization. We walk through life thinking we understand, thinking we see clearly, only to discover that we've been looking through a filter all along. And when that filter breaks—whether through loss, failure, unexpected joy, or simple grace—we're granted a gift we never knew we needed: the gift of seeing anew.
I've met people who spend their entire lives trying to repair the glass, to piece it back together exactly as it was. They work tirelessly to restore their old way of seeing, convinced that the familiar view was the correct one. But maybe that's not the point. Maybe the breaking isn't a tragedy to be fixed but a mercy to be accepted.
Consider how light behaves when it hits a surface. Smooth, unbroken glass simply lets it pass through, unchanged, unremarkable. But shattered glass? It bends light in unexpected ways. It creates rainbows where there was only white. It reveals colors and possibilities that the intact surface kept hidden.
This doesn't mean we should seek destruction or celebrate chaos. There's nothing noble about deliberately breaking what is whole. But when life, in its wisdom, cracks our carefully constructed views, we have a choice: we can mourn what we thought we knew, or we can marvel at what we're finally able to see.
The man standing by the water—perhaps it's me, perhaps it's you, perhaps it's all of us—has lost his head to the vision. Not literally, but metaphorically. He's surrendered the part of himself that was so certain, so sure, so convinced of its own perspective. And in its place? Something larger. Something that sees not from the confines of a single skull but through a lens vast enough to comprehend both the trees and their reflection, the sky and its impossible color, the solid ground and the fluid water.
What are we really afraid of when we resist this kind of seeing? Is it the truth itself, or is it the admission that we've been wrong? That we've been walking confidently in directions that led nowhere? That the map we've been following was drawn by someone else, for someone else, and never quite fit the terrain of our actual lives?
The courage it takes to acknowledge this—to stand vulnerable before the shattered glass of our perceptions—is the same courage it takes to truly live. Not to exist safely within the boundaries of what we think we know, but to venture into the territory of what is actually real. And reality, when we're brave enough to face it, is often far more beautiful and terrible and wonderful than anything we imagined.
I learned something else standing by that pink lake. The fragmentation of vision doesn't mean the loss of truth. In fact, it might be the beginning of it. Each shard of broken glass still reflects something real. The task isn't to gather them all back into a single pane but to understand that truth itself might be multifaceted. That reality contains more than our singular perspective can hold. That wisdom comes not from seeing one thing perfectly, but from understanding how many things there are to see.
This is not relativism—the lazy philosophy that claims nothing is true because everything is true. This is humility—the courageous acknowledgment that our vision, however sincere, is limited. That others might see what we miss. That the Creator's design is intricate enough to accommodate multiple true perspectives without contradiction.
The green suit remains. The ground beneath our feet stays solid. The water continues to flow. These things don't change when our perception shifts. What changes is our relationship to them. We stop demanding that reality conform to our expectations and start allowing our understanding to expand toward reality.
There's a peace in this, though it doesn't come easily. It requires us to hold certainty lightly while holding truth firmly. To know that we might be wrong about the details while remaining confident in the fundamentals. To acknowledge the limits of our vision without surrendering to blindness.
As the sun set that evening, casting everything in that surreal pink glow, I realized something: the most dangerous lie is the one that looks most like truth. It's not the obvious falsehood that traps us but the partial truth we mistake for the whole story. The single shard of glass we clutch so tightly we cut ourselves, refusing to see the other pieces scattered around us.
So perhaps the real question isn't "How do I fix my broken view?" but rather "What am I finally able to see now that the glass has shattered?" What truth has been waiting patiently for me to be ready to receive it? What beauty was always there, just beyond the reach of my limited gaze?
The trees will keep growing. The water will keep flowing. The sky will turn that impossible pink again on some future evening. And we—headless, vulnerable, stripped of our certainty—will stand there, finally ready to see not what we expected, but what actually is.
That, perhaps, is the real journey. Not from blindness to sight, but from comfortable blindness to uncomfortable clarity. From the safety of assumptions to the adventure of actual seeing. From the prison of our own perspective to the vast landscape of truth.
The glass is already broken. It broke long before we noticed. The only question that remains is whether we'll spend our energy trying to repair it or use it to finally see clearly.
