I’ve taken to eating soft boiled eggs in the early afternoon, instead of investing in the grand festival of breakfast that can sometimes consume an entire morning. It’s a joy to indulge, but I love having the first couple hours of the day to work out, clean and slide into work mode. I always thought of myself as a night owl, but I must admit my morning tendencies. In a sharp Getting-To-Know-Thyself twist, I’ve found I’m more clear headed if I don’t eat right away.
As a lifelong breakfast devotee, this is a shock. I spent most of my twenties working either in retail or restaurants, where your personal schedule is torn into whatever fits into the business’ needs. While I appreciated the restaurant’s staff meal, I went years without establishing much control over what I ate. During those years breakfast was the only meal that was really mine, so I treated it as a sacred ritual. Now I’m waving it goodbye in the hopes of servicing the greater good—I’ll keep you posted!
Anyway, back to the soft boiled eggs. The magic of delicately placing a cool oval shell in dancing water cannot be understated. If you move too quickly, you suffer immediate consequences—cloudy water leads to milky bubbles and suddenly a rubbery plume of white attaches to the cracked shell, signaling a compromised egg.
Everyone has their own egg recipe. Unlike a cake, you can’t stick it with a fork and check for crumbs. Some reject boiling water entirely and rely solely on the translucent heat of steam, others swear on a post-boil ice bath. No one can say for sure, as the mystery of process will forever be concealed behind a thin opaque barrier.
There are few universal truths left and I am happy to remind you of one: an older egg is much easier to peel than a freshly laid one. For a long time I didn’t pay attention to this rule. I wasn’t boiling enough eggs to care about what I thought were trivial specifics—oh how wrong I was. When the shell comes off in large fragments, connected by that stunning sheer sheath, you know you’ve done something right.
It feels counter intuitive, to imagine an egg would be easier to maneuver with age. We’re taught that youth offers more flexibility, but in many ways I’ve seen age bring a sense of detachment from the forms that once felt so rigid. In actuality, we all experience a number of shells over the course of our lives. It’s easy to cling to one, but by doing so we close off access to the mystery of the internal world. The silence of the interior offers more than we can imagine, because of its formless nature. Each of us has to find it on our own terms, navigating the lens of our individual conditioning. This point is where organized religion falls short, as we cannot all follow one map to the center of our self. (Don’t tell me you’re an atheist unless you’ve tried the individual experience of spirit. It may feel thrilling to deny an alternative realm of existence, but all thrills wear off.)
Anyway, back to the egg. To peel an egg is to reveal its most vulnerable aspect: the yolk. It may be runny and wet, overtaking the plate with a yellow hue. It is in those times where control is relinquished that possibilities flow. Messiness isn’t always optional. Through experience, we all learn to ride those unexpected moments of state change. With familiarity, they present less of a crisis and gradually come to show up as offerings.
I had to take my dad to the emergency room this weekend—his knee has been super swollen and put him in a constant state of pain. He’s usually in pain, so he ignored the new source for a few days, thinking he could walk it off. But his knee wasn’t having that approach and the situation got worse. Finally my mom held an “intervention” a.k.a surprising us both with a three-way call while she was out for a walk, demanding my dad see a doctor. 24 hours later I was sitting with him in the ER. It was a small hospital so we were put into the hallway, me seated just inches from gurneys carrying people from ambulances.
Every time I have to take a parent to the E.R. it feels like an inevitable shedding of shell, sometimes with a disastrous crack mid-boil. The hospital is not my favorite place, but this visit was different. I was concerned, but not overly emotional. I walked out of there without crying. I kept the runaway train of thoughts at the station, instead of allowing my mind to get ahead of the situation with random scenarios.
For once we were placed in the pot of boiling water and I took a second to decide if I wanted to fully submerge. I had to ask: is this my egg? When you’re with someone you love it can be very difficult to distinguish that answer. We’re all so deeply connected yet we’re born into different shells for this lifetime.
What I’ve found from all these cracked shell moments is this: anytime I start taking on the emotional weight of someone else’s lesson, I am doing a disservice to both myself and them. It feels so easy to scoop up the mess of a cracked shell mid-boil, but it’s never simple.
So I backed away from the edge of the roiling water. I’m navigating the space between doing too much and not enough. I’m expanding the space between softness and strength. Right now, my shell is whole and I won’t pretend it’s any other way.
That’s all for today.
xx
James
Ahhhhhh! What an anecdote of life well served! Thank you immensely for this. It hit all the right places ✨✨