Broken is one adjective that hasn’t applied to me for a while. There have been times when it felt like it was stuck like glue, or an adhesive far more powerful and impervious to solvents of removal. Most of those times it had the word ‘heart’ preceding it, a compound word that is still too simple for what it describes.

Heartbreak should be a temporary state – heartbroken is no way to be for months on end. It gets you thinking that there must be something wrong with you. Thinking like that doesn’t fix anything or renew the wellspring of your emotional capacity or make you heal any quicker.

There are other things that can pull your heart shards together and manifest something amazingly brand-new when you thought for sure you were headed straight to discard-and-replace – and the really first-rate ones don’t involve much thinking at all.

The last time such a thing happened to me there was something almost sacred to it, nowhere close to sacrilegious – a giddy rite undertaken by non-religious people on the spur of the moment with no sense of ceremony or pause to reflect.

Some friends and I stripped down to our underwear on a just-barely-moonlit beach on an early October night, huddling up and then breaking away to run pell-mell into the ocean, together in the hasty breathless pulse of the moment but each on our own among the waves.

I didn’t do this for any reason other than that it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had long since given up on letting go and gathered my brokenness in close, holding it at the center of my thoughts and plans and self-concept as though it could possibly be an organizing principle for any way I wanted to live.

Since that night, starting up again just a few nights after it in fact and picking up from some of the places I’d left off, I’ve made bad decisions, sorely misjudged the intentions of a few key individuals, gone too far in futile efforts to impress, and berated myself up one side and down the other for all of that and more.

These parts of my story reveal some still-in-progress elements of my character and personality which clearly did not magically mature into formidable strength and unwavering self-confidence as a result of that scandalous dip in the sea.

But where I might be inclined to focus on the recurring themes of dead-end relationships and self-defeating life-navigation maneuvers and feel abjectly certain that their (relatively few) incidences outweigh the (many other, truly thrilling) themes that make up the balance of the musical score of my life (there should be one – magnum opus time!), the me that did something so unlike the me I thought I was doomed to go on being forever says, hey wait a minute.

Look at this highlight from my life, this bizarro un-private blip of a baptism which I keep pulling to the top of the reel for some odd reason, scoring it with what that night became my anthem forevermore, and hold out hope without being dissuaded by fear that it’s unfounded. What’s unfounded is that fear, and most of them in fact.

This hope, more to the point a belief in better days taking shape though I may not be shaping them with any conscious control, has become a very specific element of my life.

I can hardly describe it, so when I try to convince someone that some of their own might be a good idea, I don’t get very far. And perhaps that’s as it should be – these things just have to happen to you, to make you realize that broken is not all you are or ever will be.

Broken is not an inflection point, or a one-way ticket to a predetermined future, or the central theme of your life story. You can be broken, and so much more, including but not limited to being better than you could have been if your life had never admitted such a state.

References to the fullness of time irk me but it is something that comes up in the course of a life. It’s a smug and infuriating phrase, all the more so because it does apply every so often.