calamity ovenbird At school the children were given eggs and tasked with protecting them from a drop. My daughter built a space ship from a paper cup and bubble wrap and tied it to a parachute crafted from a plastic bag. She touched the peak of her egg’s most perfect point and tucked it into the pod designed to save its head from cracking against gravity's hard heart. Then she heaved it over the edge of a table and watched it find the unforgiving floor. It survived intact, thanks to the ingenuity of her engineering, and she brought the egg home in its air-cushioned home where it promptly tipped from her desktop and tumbled straight into the grate of an air purifier. There the shell broke open and its slippery guts slid into the whirring fan. And so, while the egg withstood its inaugural fall, its survival resulted in nearly $200 worth of damage as I will now have to buy a new air purifier. I find myself wishing that the original experiment had failed spectacularly to prevent the future catastrophe. And it made me think that, perhaps, many things in life are like this–a perceived disaster might inadvertently save you from a far worse fate, and we never really know what calamities we have avoided through our breaking. 260313 what's it to you? who go blather from