Picking Up The Pieces

We've all been there.
We dropped the box of granola, at random, totally out of the blue.
Us - the Wonder-women and the Supermen that we are, always so 'together' and all.... we lost our balance for a split second, and hundreds of little crumbs of oats, or cranberries, or raisins or whatever, found themselves in distant corners of the kitchen floor. 

And then we grunt. Or we sigh. Or we beat ourselves up a bit.
​Or we yell at our spouse because it must be his or her fault that the granola box was slightly open or right on the edge of the kitchen counter!? Or we blame it on the dog or we laugh a little because we all heard the little saying 'Don't cry over spilled milk'... And then we PICK OURSELVES UP, and kneel down to the floor, humbled by our mistake and start PICKING UP THE PIECES. Little by Little. Granola chunk by another.
We then throw it in the trash (or back in the box if we are really savage that day) and go on with our day. Five minutes later, it's like it never even happened. 
​
It's like an epic breakup - from the one you thought was The One, or mister or mrs. Right, or the Right Now if you are the type that is afraid of foreverness like I am; We first have to seep in the misery of the loss; listen to songs that remind us of our loved one; cry ourselves to sleep at night; go over all our photos and text messages to remind us who we were with that person. Then, we think to ourselves 'Will I ever love again?' 'Will anyone love me again?' 'Was it a mistake to break-up?' 'Was it a mistake to be together to begin with?' We ponder over this for a while. Maybe a day. or a month. A year, possibly. A FEW years for some. Or a lifetime for the unlucky few of us.
But there is a day when we begin to PICK OURSELVES BACK UP AGAIN.
Maybe we go on a date, or fall in love, or sign up to a dating site.
And suddenly our heart is mended again. Scarred, sure, but mended, and together, and maybe even bigger than before. So big we could nearly forget how broken it was before. 

Or it's also like a pandemic that put us all in collective panic, where we all went to the grocery shops clinging to our purses or holding on to our bodies, for protection. Wearing masks and washing our hands obsessively. Only our eyes would reveal to each other how afraid we were.
And suddenly, time passes.
The reality sets in and it becomes easier to wear the mask - heck, we even have a whole collection of them in our closet. And washing our hands is completely on auto-pilot now, and actually is a pretty good habit we wished we had years before, and the outside world is not so scary anymore.
So we show up, in the streets, at the grocery stores, at the beach or the parks, this time with a little more twinkle in our eyes. A twinkle that sends the message 'we'll get through this' to one another.
We are picking up the pieces of our collective trauma, and we'll rise again and forget it was ever scary at all.
We begin, little by little, day by day, human by human. ​