Crashing Change and Cracks in the Glass

A loud crash rang out in the middle of the night, shattering the nighttime silence and jolting me from my nighttime slumber. The dog suddenly began barking, growling, leaping up from his pillow bed to sprint toward the front of the house and any potential danger.

The clock said 4 am.

As it happened, I was partially awake because my pump had run out of insulin and started beeping at me shortly before this mystery noise. So while I was dozing in and out, I wasn’t fully asleep.

Unsure of what the noise might be, I arose to investigate. Walked to each room to look for the possible culprit. Turned on lights. Inspected the rooms carefully.

No broken dishes. No clear signs anything had fallen off the walls. No shelves collapsing. Nothing had appeared to fall off a table.

Looking out the windows, nothing appeared to be clearly wrong.

And so, I soothes the dog, calming him down, and we went back to sleep.

Only the next morning when entering my home office to begin the day, with coffee cup in hand, I sat down at my desk chair and noticed something amiss on the floor nearby.

A small rectangular stained glass piece of art had fallen from my office window next to my desk. It had been hanging on a clear command strip, but apparently that failed overnight.

And the stained glass came crashing down.

I had this small artwork hanging on my office window for more than a decade, since we moved back to this state in this house. The neighbors’ red brick wall greets me out my office window, so I added a little bit of sunshine art to brighten the mood instead of just a brick wall staring back.

Picking it up from the hardwood floor, I noticed a large curved crack stretching along horizontally from too right corner to the bottom left. The rectangle was still intact, but it was clearly fragile and broken despite not shattering.

This was not the first time it had fallen.

That had happened a couple times before, as the small silver chain had broken a year earlier, and we replaced it and hung it up again. Prior to that, a window suction cop had failed and everything fell to the floor. 

But those earlier moments, the glass didn’t break. The artwork had survived, only to make it this far. The time had finally come.

We knew it was going to fall and break eventually. It just took a lot longer than we thought. And hung on strongly shining until this moment overnight. ☀️ 

It was a shock, but not overly a surprise. I even recall, adding a new stained glass piece of artwork to my Amazon cart at least a couple years ago, planning to have a replacement when the time came for this current sunshine version to fall.

Interestingly, this is very similar to my employment situation these days.

Since 2015, I’ve been in largely the same role with the same company, not withstanding a few acquisitions and spinoffs through the years that changed who actually signed my paychecks. That’s 11.5 years. Actually, it was more than 14 years since I took on the will that would lead to this company a few years later.

It’s been no secret to people in my life that my company has been going through rounds of layoffs over the past handful of years. I’d managed to survive several rounds of cuts in recent years, all of these layoffs in the name of post-pandemic restructuring and lately, with the emergence of AI in the content business world.

But much like the stained glass, my number was finally called.

That happened to be about 10 days before the stained glass fell from my home office window in the middle of the night.

Shocking, sure. But really, mostly surprising that it took this long for my role to be eliminated or for this stained glass to finally fall to the floor and experience a traumatic break.

I’m not mad about it. There were some great times, and a whole lot of artistic sunshine brightened my days through the many years. There were storms and clouds and sunshine, and moonlight out that window.

With that artsy sunshine smiling and observing my workdays, there have been countless Zoom calls and an endless array of words on many different screens. Two dogs and so many moments with ranging emotions.

This is the nature of change. You may be lucky at times, where you welcome it, or even initiate the change. But so often in life, change happens against your wishes. Big and small changes arrive, often at the most inopportune time. They may be a shock, even if they’re not surprising and you didn’t want it.

So here we are.

The glass has fallen and cracked. No repair for this particular piece of artwork. We move forward to what’s next.

Now, as I sit at my desk and begin searching for the next chapter of my career, there’s a brick wall staring at me through the window.

Yes, I do feel cracked. I do feel like I’m staring at an unappealing brick wall.

But I am not shattered. My spirit is not broken apart. Even if I don’t replace it soon, or hang it up in the same way or in the same place, I know there’s another piece of stained glass artwork on the horizon.

The sun will rise again.