The Erosion of a Quiet Certainty Part 2 by Goh Ling Yong
The first time I noticed the crack, it wasn’t with a crash or a moment of drama. It was in the quiet hum of a Tuesday afternoon, the kind of stillness that settles in a house when the day has found its rhythm. Sunlight, thick with dust motes, slanted across the bookshelf, and for a reason I can no longer recall, my eyes landed on the small ceramic bowl I had made two summers before.
It sat there, a quiet testament to a former self. A self who believed in the tangible results of patience, in the clean, satisfying arc of creation. I remembered the feel of the clay, a cool, silken slip through my fingers, the focused meditation of the potter’s wheel turning under my steady hands. I had shaped it, glazed it in a shade of celadon that reminded me of seafoam on a cloudy day, and fired it until it was strong, resonant, and—I had thought—perfect. It held the quiet certainty of my own two hands.
But there, on that Tuesday, the sunlight illuminated what the shadows had concealed. A hairline fracture, a spiderweb-thin silver line running from the lip halfway down its belly. It was almost invisible, a secret the bowl had been keeping. I felt a strange, hollow pang in my chest, a disproportionate grief for this small, inanimate thing. It hadn’t been dropped. It hadn’t been struck. It had simply… cracked. As if the internal stress of its own beautiful, solid form had finally become too much to bear.
That crack became a focal point. A single, errant thread in the carefully woven tapestry of my life. In the days that followed, I started seeing other threads, other hairline fractures I had previously ignored.
My belief system, much like that bowl, had been built with meticulous care. It was a sturdy architecture founded on simple principles: work hard, be kind, plan meticulously, and the structure will hold. If you pour enough love and effort into something—a relationship, a career, a garden—it will flourish. This wasn't an arrogant assumption, but a quiet, deeply held faith in cause and effect, in the fundamental fairness of effort. It was my own personal physics.
But pulling on that single, ceramic thread began the unraveling.
I saw it in my garden. For years, I had cultivated a small patch of earth behind my apartment, coaxing rosemary and mint and stubborn tomato vines from the city soil. I saw it as a direct collaboration with nature—I provided the care, the water, the weeding, and nature provided the bounty. But that season, a persistent, thorny weed I couldn’t identify choked out the basil. A blight turned the tomato leaves a sickly, mottled yellow. My effort, it seemed, was no longer enough. The equation had been broken.
I felt it in a friendship that had once been as solid and reliable as granite. There was no argument, no betrayal. Just a slow, silent drift. Conversations that once flowed like a river now felt stilted, full of careful pauses and unspoken things. We were two shores of the same land, slowly being eroded by a current neither of us knew how to navigate. My attempts to bridge the distance—thoughtful texts, invitations for coffee—were stones dropped into a vast, quiet ocean, sinking without a ripple. The physics of connection, too, had failed me.
The erosion was a quiet, insidious thing. It didn’t announce itself with thunder; it whispered in the rustle of blighted leaves and the silence of an unanswered message. My quiet certainty, the belief that I could shape and control the small world around me through sheer force of will and care, was turning to dust.
One evening, sorting through old papers, I found a manuscript from my early twenties. The title page read, simply, “Stories from the Edge of a Dream, by Goh Ling Yong.” The signature was bold, the loops confident and unbroken. I remembered the person who wrote that name. He believed stories could fix the world. He believed love was a fortress. He believed that if you were a good person, the narrative of your life would naturally arc toward a satisfying conclusion.
I looked at that name, that confident ghost, and I didn't recognize him. His certainty felt naive, almost foreign. The world wasn’t a well-structured story. It was a chaotic poem, full of half-rhymes and broken meter. And my own narrative felt less like an arc and more like a slow, downward spiral.
This was the heart of the unraveling. It wasn’t just about a bowl or a garden or a friendship. It was about the loss of a fundamental belief in my own agency. If my best efforts were not enough, then what was the point of the effort at all? The world, which had once seemed a place of potential, now felt governed by a quiet, indifferent entropy. Things fell apart not because of malice or mistake, but simply because that is their nature. The center cannot hold.
I left the cracked bowl on the shelf, a silent monument to my failure. I stopped looking at it, but I was always aware of its presence, a quiet accusation in the corner of my eye.
The peak—or perhaps the nadir—of this erosion came on a rainy Sunday. The world outside was a watercolor wash of grey and green. Inside, the silence was heavy, thick with my own spiraling thoughts. I felt fragile, hollowed out. The sturdy vessel I had believed myself to be was riddled with fractures I could no longer ignore.
I walked to the bookshelf, my movements slow, deliberate. I picked up the bowl. I expected it to feel different, lighter, compromised. But it was still heavy, still cool to the touch. I ran my thumb over the crack. It was a tiny ridge, a scar. The sound it had made when it broke, I imagined, wasn't a shatter. It was a quiet, internal ping, the sound of a tension releasing.
Holding it, I didn’t feel the familiar sting of failure. Instead, a different thought, fragile and new, began to form.
The crack did not erase the memory of the clay spinning in my hands. It did not negate the focus, the care, the hope that went into its creation. It was not an ending. It was simply… part of its story now. A flaw, yes, but a flaw that told a truth. A truth about internal pressures, about the quiet, unseen forces that shape and sometimes break us. A truth about the illusion of permanence.
The bowl was no longer a symbol of perfection. It had become a symbol of resilience. It had broken, but it had not shattered. It still held its shape. It was still beautiful, perhaps even more so. The Japanese have a word for this, kintsugi—the art of repairing broken pottery with gold, celebrating the scars as part of the object’s history. My bowl had no gold, only a thin line of air where wholeness used to be, but the principle felt the same. The imperfection was now integral to its identity.
My belief hadn’t been wrong, just… incomplete. The world isn’t a simple equation of effort and reward. It’s a complex, unpredictable dance of creation and decay, of holding on and letting go. My job was not to build an impenetrable fortress against the world, but to learn how to stand among the beautiful, inevitable ruins. To find the beauty not just in the whole, but in the gracefully broken.
I did not throw the bowl away. I washed the dust from it and placed it on my desk. It no longer holds water or soup. It holds my pens, their smooth, straight lines a stark contrast to the fractured curve of the ceramic. It serves a new purpose, one it was not originally designed for.
The erosion of my quiet certainty was the most painful, disorienting experience of my life. But in the space it cleared, something new has taken root. It’s a quieter, more humble belief. It’s a belief in the value of showing up, not to control the outcome, but for the sake of the effort itself. It’s an acceptance of the cracks, in myself and in the world, as maps of where the light gets in.
The unraveling of that single thread did not destroy the tapestry. It only revealed the intricate, flawed, and far more interesting pattern that was there all along. The unraveling was not the end. It was the beginning of a different, more honest weave.
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