What a Simple Jug Can Tell Us About Life

By Janice Hunter of Sharing the Journey

The only difference between an extraordinary life and an ordinary one is the extraordinary pleasures you find in ordinary things. ~ Veronique Vienne.

I stood at the kitchen sink, robotically washing dishes. I paused, my gaze landing on a hand-painted jug on the window ledge, raindrops running down the glass.

I clung to the sink with soapy hands, hunched forward, eyes clenched shut, terrified that I might miss another deadline, that I’d never have another moment of revelation, the inspiration that flows in and fills me up then spills over into my writing and my online coaching.

Washed out and weary, worried about money, unable to capture moments of fleeting inspiration as they flit and dance through my day, just out of reach, I stood, suds dripping, tears running down my face.

A quick wipe with the back of my hand, all traces gone, I picked up a tea towel and started to dry the dishes. Plates, bowls and jugs from our years in Greece and Portugal, all different sizes, shapes and designs.

I looked again at the small jug on the window ledge. Cobalt blue and bottle green, ringed in bands of yellow and rusty red hearts. Sometimes I use it for flowers; most often, it stays empty, reminding me to be present, to stay open to inspiration and abundance. I looked down at the draining board and suddenly realised that not only do I have a lot of jugs, I seem to have been collecting and cherishing them all my life.

There’s a porcelain one from Portugal, hand-painted with deer and flowers which we only use for gravy on feast days and holidays.

There’s a little pastel-coloured striped one with a flat bottom that’s used for milk when we have visitors; it’s the kind a sailor’s wife would keep on her window ledge, filled with snowdrops. A round-bellied classic white jug for water. A sturdy terracotta one decorated with a blue glaze and white slip. A spout-less pink tin cylinder for Greek retsina. An elegant, clear glass bottle with a gem-blue glass stopper that I use on warm days to keep water cold in the fridge.

Pencils in a chipped, speckled stoneware jug. A spider plant in a blue teapot. I rushed to the dining room and stared at what I now saw was a collection in my cabinet, in among all the other mismatched crockery.

There, in pride of place, a single-setting tea service with sugar bowl and milk jug, painted decades ago by my mum’s elderly cousin, the artist who never married after her fiancé died in World War Two. We used to give my mum breakfast in bed every year on Mother’s Day, the tea tray laid with an embroidered cloth and those same dishes.

I remembered my grandmother pouring milk from a blue and white pitcher and friends’ birthday parties with ice cream and jelly and always large glass jugs of sparkling lemonade and orange juice. Always a woman somewhere, carrying a jug, offering something, pouring something.

All of my jugs are beautiful. They’re all unique and chosen, loved and special for something. They’re not meant to be permanently full; they’re designed to be filled and emptied as they pour.

Like us, they’re beautiful just as they are, even when all they hold are memories and promise and a little bit of now.

I took the tea towel and lovingly dried and put away my crockery, went into the garden and found a few rain-drenched miniature daffodils and a spray of fragrant white hyacinth to put in my little heart jug at the window.

Sometimes we wait knowingly, patiently, for inspiration to fill us to overflowing. Sometimes, we simply need to love ourselves enough.

Janice Hunter is a writer and certified life coach whose blog Sharing the Journey provides soul food and support for writers, coaches, parents and home-based workers. This piece first appeared in her Coaching Moments column, the monthly newsletter of The International Association of Coaching.

Tagged as: creativity, inspiration, self acceptance