We’re all broken. That’s how the light gets in. (Ernest Hemingway)
As a child I remember that we had a beautiful 5-inch figurine of a Kingfisher on the mantelpiece. He had a long, elegant, characteristic Kingfishery beak, held high on a sturdy neck, down which he peered at all who entered the lounge. One day, I clumsily knocked him off the mantelpiece. He remained mostly intact but to my horror his beak had broken in at least two places. I was doomed.
My father was one of those expert menders for whom nothing is ever really broken as long as there is a reasonable chance of repair. In next to no time he had masterfully glued the beak back onto Mr Kingfisher and restored him to his fireside roost. But on closer inspection, I noticed that his beak was now a rather stubbier version of the original (with no obvious signs of the break). No!!
For a short while I felt bad for Mr K. I had forever altered his majestic profile and felt that I could sense his shame every time I walked into the lounge and couldn’t meet his gaze. In fact, it was my shame that I felt not his. He was up there sitting as proudly as before and just as beautiful but in a new, totally unique way. Strangely, I noticed him more than I had before and became aware that his new beak seemed perfectly imperfect (he never did get to say how he felt about the whole experience — I put words in his beak of course but he seemed proud as ever).
I was thinking about Mr Kingfisher recently, whilst pondering brokenness in relation to human experience. Many of us feel broken by our experiences in life and find ourselves, like I did, feeling a sense of shame and regret. Somehow the act of breaking has marked us as unworthy for display or unfit for purpose — never to be the same again and to all intents and purposes a failure. We are the walking wounded.
Wrong.Completely understandable, but wrong.
In fact, it’s our experience of brokenness that makes us stronger; it’s our experience of brokenness that makes us humbler; it’s our experience of brokenness that repurposes our lives in new, unexpected and surprising ways.
Being broken isn’t the worst thing. We can be mended and put together again. We don’t have to be ashamed of our past. We can embrace the history that gives us value, and see our cracks as beautiful. (Anna White)
I love this! (thanks Anna). I think the Japanese Kintsugi practitioners would too as they work their extraordinary alchemy over broken pots, mending them with lacquer dusted with gold, silver or platinum, rendering the original perhaps even more beautiful than before.
It may take some help, to both embrace our history and, moving forward, to see our cracks as beautiful and this is where a coach, or guide, is invaluable. Someone who is able to come alongside us in our brokenness and, rather like the Kintsugi people, help begin the journey of mending; making the impossible possible and even revealing new truth and beauty in the process.
Hemingway was right in as much as the brokenness allows light in to the darkness that illuminates the mending process. I’ll take that for now…
