The Honest Potential of a Mason Jar

Does anybody else own actual drinking glasses but somehow drink almost exclusively out of mason jars?

I was unloading the dishwasher today and realized the majority of what I was putting away was coffee mugs and mason jars, which probably says more about me than I care to unpack.

Coffee mugs, because apparently coffee is a food group in this house. Mason jars, because somewhere along the way we collectively decided perfectly good drinking glasses were unnecessary when Ball already gave us something with measurements on the side.

And I stood there holding one and had the strangest thought.

A mason jar has an absurd amount of potential for something so damn basic.

It’s a glass jar. That’s it. No batteries. No Bluetooth. No monthly subscription. It doesn’t need an app. It doesn’t even come with particularly impressive instructions.

Jar. Lid. Good luck.

Yet think about everything we do with them.

We can vegetables and jam in them. Drink sweet tea out of them. Store flour, sugar, coffee, pancake mix, noodles, dog biscuits, buttons, screws, craft supplies, Legos, and whatever other tiny crap we’re tired of stepping on.

People make cookie mixes in them, cakes, overnight oats, salads. You can put a shaker lid on one, a straw lid, a pump, a sprouting lid. Turn it into a candle. Use the measurements on the side. Freeze certain ones. Blend things in some of them with the right setup.

Put flowers in one and suddenly it’s a vase. Put fireflies in one and suddenly you’re eight years old again. Put moonshine in one and suddenly we’re not discussing this on a work computer.

Same jar. Completely different possibilities.

And I think that’s what stopped me in the middle of unloading the dishwasher.

Potential.

I’m a “what if?” person, probably to an exhausting degree.

What if I tried this? What if I applied for that? What if I asked? What if I built it? What if I changed directions? What if this weird little idea rattling around in my head actually worked?

“What if?” has gotten me into some spectacular messes over the years. It has also taken me places I never would have gotten by staying comfortable.

Because I’ve learned something about asking questions. The answer can absolutely be no. Sometimes it will be no. Sometimes it’ll be a loud, embarrassing, door-slamming no.

But if you never ask, you’ve already answered it yourself.

You closed the lid before anything ever had the opportunity to get inside.

I think sometimes we do the same thing to ourselves. We get really attached to whatever is currently in our jar.

This is my job. This is what I’m good at. This is what people expect from me. This is where I live. This is who I’ve always been. This is what I’ve always done.

Somewhere along the way, the contents start becoming the identity of the container.

But a mason jar full of flour isn’t a flour jar forever.

Wash it out and tomorrow it might hold coffee. Next week it might hold dog treats. Ten years from now somebody might find it in the back of a cabinet, stick peonies in it, and set it on a kitchen table.

The jar didn’t lose its identity when its purpose changed. Its usefulness didn’t expire because one chapter ended. It simply had room for something else.

I think people are allowed to be like that too.

You can be good at something and still want something different. You can love one chapter and still turn the page. You can have spent years building one version of yourself and still wonder what another version might look like.

And you can carry several things at once.

Parent. Employee. Friend. Spouse. Business owner. Dreamer. Teacher. Student. Absolute disaster some Tuesdays.

We’re complicated little mason jars.

And just like jars, we do have limits. You cannot put 32 ounces into a 16-ounce jar and then become personally offended when physics refuses to cooperate.

Yet we do that to ourselves constantly.

We cram in another responsibility, another expectation, another favor, another goal, another person’s problem, and then wonder why we’re spilling all over the damn counter.

Capacity matters. Knowing yours doesn’t diminish your potential. It actually helps you use it.

Because potential isn’t the expectation that you become everything, and I think that’s where we sometimes get it wrong.

Potential isn’t, Look at all these things you should be doing.

Potential is, look at all the things you could do.

There’s freedom in that difference.

Maybe your jar is full right now, and maybe you’re exactly where you want to be. Maybe it’s half-full and you’re figuring things out. Maybe it’s empty.

We tend to treat empty like it’s a bad word. Empty schedule. Empty nest. Empty page. Empty position. Empty space where something used to be.

But an empty mason jar isn’t useless.

It has room.

That’s a very different way to look at emptiness.

And sometimes jars break. People do too. Life drops us on the kitchen floor every once in a while and doesn’t even have the decency to apologize.

Maybe afterward we can’t hold exactly what we used to. That doesn’t automatically make us useless. Sometimes purpose changes. Sometimes something gets repurposed. Sometimes the broken pieces become part of something entirely different.

There’s beauty in the broken, too. Not because breaking is beautiful, but because potential can survive it.

Maybe that’s why I like the mason jar so much.

It’s ordinary, strong, useful and adaptable. You can see straight through most of them, and somehow you still never know what one might be holding tomorrow.

And I think there’s something wonderfully honest about that kind of potential.

Not the motivational-poster version that tells us we can be absolutely anything if we just believe hard enough. We can’t. We’re human. We have capacities, circumstances, responsibilities and limits. Sometimes the answer really is no.

But there are also possibilities we haven’t considered yet. Doors we haven’t knocked on. Questions we haven’t asked. Versions of ourselves we haven’t met. Ideas sitting in the back of our minds waiting for us to finally say, Well... what if?

Maybe you get a no.

Fine. Wash the jar and try something else.

Because you really never know what could be in there tomorrow. Noodles. Dog biscuits. Legos. Or something you haven’t even thought of yet.

That’s the thing about honest potential. It doesn’t promise you what comes next. It just leaves enough room to find out.

And apparently, I learned all of that because I needed to unload the damn dishwasher.