Yesterday, I sat down to create something with air dry clay. I had a hundred ideas in mind, fleeting thoughts of designs and moulds, and I was dying to begin an art project at last.

But once I had mixed the clay, I found that it was near impossible to shape it into something discernable. It sagged under its own weight, collapsed when I tried to give it structure, and refused to hold the neat, deliberate form I had pictured.

My hands kept trying to correct it- smooth one side, pinch the other, even the cracks unfurling across it using water-dipped fingers. Every adjustment seemed to undo the last. What was supposed to be something graceful slowly turned into an uneven lump that looked nothing like the tidy picture in my head.

Giving up with a sigh and wiping the clay off my hands, I realised that this was a fitting metaphor for life.

I had thought the difficult part would be shaping the clay. Instead, most of the effort went into keeping it from collapsing while I tried to mould it.

It is simply the ongoing task of holding the material together long enough to keep shaping it.

Every day, you push things back together when they fall apart at the seams, adding water when it dries out, accepting that the final form will look different from the sketch you first sat down with.

Perhaps that is what life truly is: a misshapen lump of clay.
(Though if this experiment proved anything, it’s that I probably shouldn’t take up sculpture anytime soon!)

Yours truly,
Divi