When my son was smaller, I tried to help him understand, when by accident he dropped a cup or broke something (for accidents happen), that people matter more than things.
It was a saying we used when something went wrong in which something was broken. We still use it because things still get broken. It was the glue we used to stick together the broken bits of his heart and show him he was more important than those material things. As the years have gone by, those words have grown into a way of looking at the world and of measuring what is important.
The human race is as fragile as a china tea set. We all live in the shadow of delicate relationships. A wrong word or a scowl and we react - our defences high, our image protected. There is no use pretending it is otherwise. We are, after all, human.
