AES41 Kintsugi

“The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong in the broken places”

 Ernest Hemingway 

 

There is an ancient Japanese artform that seeks out to repair broken pottery with gold, called Kintsugi. The philosophy behind this is actually very deep and wise. When you accidentally break something, say a plate, we usually try to repair it in a way that hides the damage. But with Kintsugi, they instead repair the cracks with resin mixed with gold, highlighting the damage that was caused, turning the cracks into something beautiful to be appreciated, rather than some sort of damage to be concealed. In a way, this damaged product is even more beautiful and meaningful than when it was unbroken.

The fractures in a ceramic bowl does not signify the end of its life, it should be looked at as a crucial moment of transformation and growth. In this way, we are also like these broken pottery. We all have dealt with some form of trauma or damage in our past. In that broken vulnerability, it’s a powerful moment that shows us who we really are, what we really need. Usually after dealing with trauma we want to move past it, heal and go back to the good times, but this usually comes with the false pretense that the bad times never happened. Instead we should learn to accept what happened and learn from it.

Kintsugi is the art of embracing imperfection, it’s not something to be ashamed of, nothing to hide. We can find beauty in impermanence and imperfection, in fact, that’s when beauty shines the most. Your scars can be a testament to your will to survive, they are hard lessons that made you the person you are today. These scars and traumas doesn’t mean that we’re less than we were before, it means that having gone through it, we have grown into something better than before.

 

"There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in" - Leonard Cohen