Glass is Fragile

“Life is what happens while we are busy making other plans.”
Allen Saunders (later immortalised by John Lennon in “Beautiful Boy”)

There is an old saying that family reunions nourish the soul.

In our family, they also appear to nourish the stomach.

My brother had just arrived from the United States. My sister had flown in from Australia a couple of days earlier. After three years apart, the airport was filled with hugs, laughter, accusations of growing older, and the obligatory family audit of expanding waistlines and receding hairlines. (On the latter count, I had long since decided to embrace aerodynamic efficiency.)

By the time the emotional reunion had concluded, it was well past midnight.Now there is something about emotionally charged reunions that makes one extraordinarily hungry. Either joy burns calories or airports simply have a mysterious effect upon human metabolism.

Naturally, we drifted towards the Subway outlet.

Now I have always admired Subway.

It is perhaps the closest the fast-food industry has come to representative democracy.Every citizen gets to design his own destiny.No two sandwiches need ever be alike.

The process begins innocently enough.

“Which bread would you like, Sir?”

Italian White. Roasted Garlic. Parmesan Oregano. Honey Oat. Multigrain.

I was already beginning to suspect that choosing a sandwich involved more decision making than selecting members of a Parliamentary coalition .

Having survived the constitutional crisis of bread selection came the vegetables.

Lettuce. Tomatoes. Onions. Cucumbers. Olives. Pickles. Green peppers.Jalapenos.

Each one displayed behind an expansive sheet of sparkling glass, almost inviting one’s stomach to overrule one’s common sense.

Then arrived the sauces.

Honey Mustard. Sweet Onion. Chipotle. Mint Mayo. Tandoori Mayo. Peri Peri Mayo. Red Chilli. Barbecue.

Human civilisation has invented remarkably few things as dangerous as the sentence,

“Go ahead, Sir… all sauces are complimentary.”

No Indian has ever interpreted the word complimentary with greater patriotic enthusiasm.

The sandwich grows.The calorie count becomes an abstract mathematical concept.

The stomach begins applauding.

Meanwhile, the wallet whispers nervously from somewhere inside your trouser pocket.

While I was enthusiastically instructing the cheerful young lady behind the counter to add “just a little more” of practically everything, my eyes wandered upwards.

There, written in large red letters across the glass façade, was a simple notice.

GLASS IS FRAGILE.

For reasons I still cannot fully explain, I stopped speaking.

My sandwich could wait. My thoughts could not.

Three months ago, my own heart had decided that enough was enough.

It began innocently with breathlessness.

I assumed, with characteristic masculine optimism, that it was probably age, weight, stress, planetary alignment or perhaps an unusually steep staircase.

The cardiologists, unfortunately, had a less imaginative explanation.

Within days I found myself on an operating table while surgeons calmly performed what they later described as “putting in some new plumbing.”

Cardiologists possess a wonderfully understated British sense of humour.

To them, open-heart bypass surgery sounds suspiciously similar to replacing a leaking kitchen tap.

The plumbing may indeed have been repaired.

The man attached to the plumbing required rather more attention.

The stitches healed. The scar made itself present.The pain in my body slowly surrendered.The emotional bruises linger rather longer.

But the pain in my mind (and heart) I bore, long after it was felt anymore.

My apologies to William Wordsworth. I honestly do not know what I am reaping with my solitude.

Recovery has a curious way of changing one’s conversations.

Not merely with doctors. But with oneself.

Every heartbeat becomes noticeable. Every twinge acquires an autobiography. Every tomorrow quietly ceases to be taken for granted.

Standing there before a sandwich counter, I suddenly realised that perhaps life itself resembles a Subway sandwich.

The bread is our foundation. Our upbringing. Our values. Our family. Our character.

Without a good foundation, everything else simply falls apart in your hands.

The fillings are the ambitions we spend our lives accumulating. Career. Relationships. Travel. Recognition. Books. Friendships. Photography. Success. Failures that later masquerade as wisdom.

Every one of us keeps asking for “just one more topping.”

Then come the sauces. Not what life gives us. But how we choose to respond.

Some season life with Honey Mustard. Others with Sweet Onion. Some prefer the gentle optimism of Mint Mayo. Others insist on living permanently in Red Chilli mode, convinced that perpetual outrage is a personality trait.

The sandwich changes not because the bread changes. It changes because of the attitude we pour over it.

And then, while we are happily constructing what we believe is the perfect life…

Nature quietly places a notice directly in front of us.

Glass is Fragile.

So is life.

Lean too heavily upon certainty. Pile too many expectations against it.

Mistake permanence for entitlement.

And one unexpected moment reminds us that everything we love is held together by remarkably delicate threads.

Marcus Aurelius once wrote,

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do, say and think.”

He probably wasn’t standing in a Subway queue contemplating double olives when he wrote those words.

But somehow, they fit perfectly.

Perhaps our greatest mistake is believing that happiness lies in constructing the perfect sandwich.

It doesn’t.

The perfect sandwich does not exist. Neither does the perfect life.

What matters is whether we enjoyed making it… Whether we shared it… Whether we appreciated it before it became another memory.

As we left the sandwich shop that night, my stomach was comfortably full.

My surgically renovated heart was behaving rather better than it had been a few months earlier.

My mind, however, had acquired several fresh questions.

Perhaps wisdom doesn’t always arrive dressed as a philosopher.

Sometimes it hides behind a fast-food counter.

Sometimes it is written on a piece of glass that thousands of people walk past every day without ever noticing.

“Glass is Fragile.”

Three ordinary words.

A safety instruction to most.

A sermon on life to one recovering heart.

And somehow, I suspect Nature knew exactly which of us was meant to read it.