Labels on vessels

I was washing some spaghetti sauce jars the other night. And as I washed them I worked very hard to get the labels completely off of them. I wanted to use them to store dry beans and grain in my cupboard. As the labels came off the jars, I noticed that it seemed that the shape and aspect of the jars changed completely.

I could see the jar in a whole new light. First of all, the light went right through the jar and I could see its true shape. Then it looked like the volume of the jar became larger and it seemed that it could potentially hold more. Then the light hit undulations around the sides of the jar and they shimmered so beautifully in the dim fluorescent light over my kitchen sink, I had to stop and admire the beauty of that clean, empty, label-free jar.

It got me thinking about the impact of labels. The ones we put on ourselves, the ones put on us by others, and the ones we put onto them! I thought how we limit ourselves when we place a label onto ourselves or someone else, because all we see after a while is the label, and not the person under the label, or anything that they do that tells us differently than that label.

Wouldn’t it be nice to wash off all the labels and see our selves and others just as we are, with our undulations illuminated in all their brilliance in the full light of day -- I wonder what suppressed potential we would find under all the expectations (negative and positive) that those labels bare. I wonder what accomplishments could be revealed, and how much our volume could be increased.