The Japanese art form of kintsugi: embracing the imperfections of life

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Life is fragile.

We know that.

And yet, somehow, we're still surprised when it breaks.

Plans change.

Relationships end.

Businesses fail.

Bodies change.

People disappoint us.

We disappoint ourselves.

Things we thought were certain suddenly aren't.

Sometimes the damage is small.

Sometimes life gets shattered into enough pieces that we're not entirely sure how we're supposed to put it back together.

There are a lot of ways humans have tried to make sense of that.

One of my favorites comes from the Japanese art of kintsugi.

What is kintsugi?

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of putting broken pottery back together and highlighting the cracks with gold.

What I love about this is that they don't try to hide where the bowl broke.

They highlight it.

The cracks become part of the piece. Part of its history. Part of what makes it unique.

And I think there's something incredibly human about that.

Because when it comes to our own broken places, we tend to do the exact opposite.

We usually do the opposite

We spend a lot of time trying to hide the evidence that life has happened to us.

Scars. Wrinkles. Laugh lines. Stretch marks.

Failures. Mistakes.

Relationships that didn't work.

Careers that changed direction.

Years that didn't go according to plan.

Parts of ourselves we've had to repair.

We tend to treat these things like cracks in a bowl.

Damage.

Something that would be better if nobody could see it.

Something that makes us somehow less valuable than we were before.

Kintsugi asks us to look at those cracks differently.

What if the cracks are part of the story?

There's a line from Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms that I've always loved:

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

I don't think that means we have to be grateful for everything that has happened to us.

Some things just suck.

Some losses don't need a silver lining.

Some mistakes really were mistakes.

And I don't believe we have to turn every painful experience into some profound life lesson in order for it to have value.

But we do get to decide what happens next.

We repair.

We learn.

We adapt.

We change.

And eventually, the places where we've had to put ourselves back together become the strongest parts of who we are.

Maybe we develop boundaries because we once didn't have them.

Maybe we're more compassionate because we've struggled ourselves.

Maybe we trust ourselves more because we've seen what we're capable of surviving.

Maybe we're wiser because we've made mistakes.

Maybe we appreciate something differently because we once lost it.

The crack doesn't disappear.

But our relationship with it can change.

There is no perfect bowl

I think this is where kintsugi has something important to teach us.

We spend an incredible amount of energy chasing perfection.

A body without scars.

A face without wrinkles.

A career without failures.

A life without mistakes.

A story without chapters we'd rather skip.

But that's not a human life.

A human life gets used.

It changes.

It gets scratched.

Sometimes it breaks.

And hopefully it gets repaired.

There is nothing particularly interesting about making it through life completely untouched.

I'm not sure that's even possible.

The laugh lines mean you laughed.

The scar means something healed.

The failure means you tried something that didn't work.

The mistake means you know something today that you didn't know then.

The difficult season becomes part of the perspective you carry into the next one.

Those aren't necessarily defects to erase.

They're evidence of a life being lived.

Maybe strength looks a little like kintsugi

We tend to picture strength as something solid.

Unbreakable.

Unshaken.

Perfectly put together.

But maybe that's not the only kind of strength.

Maybe strength can have cracks.

Maybe strength can have scars.

Maybe strength can admit that something hurt.

That something failed.

That we got something wrong.

That there were times when we fell apart.

And maybe strength is also the willingness to pick up the pieces and begin the slow work of putting them back together.

Not pretending nothing happened.

Not hiding every imperfection.

Not trying to convince everyone that we were never broken in the first place.

Just allowing all of it to become part of the person we are now.

That's what I love about kintsugi.

It doesn't celebrate the breaking.

It honors the repair.

The cracks remain visible.

The history remains part of the piece.

And instead of hiding the places that were once broken, it paints them gold.

Maybe we could learn to do the same.