Precious faults
There are times we find ourselves falling to pieces. Life tends to have its own ways in which it forces us to embrace insight. Change. Growth.
They are rarely painless.
As a rule, we pull ourselves back together, patch ourselves up with string and band-aid. We try to resume our old shapes. They held the comfort of being familiar. A little tight-fitting, perhaps, and no longer suitable for who we have become. But familiar nonetheless.
Let’s just admit it: it doesn’t work. Not one bit.
Worst case scenario, we are confronted with rough edges sticking out from all angles, holes gaping, and we are forced into a constant fortification of weaknesses, pumping out inpouring water, propping up façades an inch from crumbling.
Best case scenario, we are inhabiting a more or less water-proof construction. But it doesn’t feel safe, or solid. And the fault lines always show.
During one of the first weeks of the Covid-19 lockdown, I broke a fragile piece of pottery that I had received as a birthday present from my dear friend Maja Jantar. Ironically, I didn’t even drop it. I pushed over something else that fell on top of it and sent it crashing to the floor, ending up in pieces.
I kept them. A number of things I have written or done over the last few weeks had something to do with — right — shards. Perhaps you noticed.
With not one but two best friends into Japanese culture, it was inevitable that in the aftermath of the breakage, I would hear about wabi sabi (the beauty of that which is imperfect) and kintsugi, a technique for repairing broken pottery with a resin-based glue to which gold dust has been added.
The symbolic beauty of it immediately convinced me. The point of kintsugi is not to glue the pieces in such a way that the pretense of previous perfection is maintained. Rather, the fault lines are made extra visible through the applying of the gold-coloured glue.
In the kintsugi approach, cracks and scars aren’t only a part of the uniqueness of the object. When treated with love and care, they will make it more beautiful.
Our fault lines are the most precious part of us.
And in fact, we know that, deep within. But in a world focused on seeming perfection, ice-cold competition and the myth of immortality, we do tend to lose track of that knowledge.
I am no handy-woman, far from it. But this particular challenge had my name on it. After a few hours of browsing the internet, I ordered a starter’s kit from a Belgian website.
It swiftly arrived by mail. I watched some more YouTube films, read the manual and… stalled.
I stalled until a new occasion presented itself for me to feel extremely fragile, an event that had me picking up the pieces of myself once again.
I felt this was the moment to put my doubts about whether or not I was handy enough on the shelf, right next to my lack of experience, and to just set my self to it, mess or no.
The meditative concentration and the slow tempo the kintsugi technique forces upon its practitioner (mix a small amount of both glue components with each other and the gold dus, apply, push the pieces together, hold, wait sufficiently long, let go carefully — repeat, just as many times as there are pieces) turned out to suit me really well.
This is the kind of work you can not do when you are nervous or stressed. The practice itself is deeply calming. Time turns syrupy like the resin you work with, flowing both swiftly and very slowly. And piece by piece something grows back together under your fingertips.
Familiar. Loved. But brand-new, too.
I am deeply grateful for the experience. And I will carry it with me, on more than one level of my being.
I already knew that it was no disgrace to show your vulnerability. And of course, I wasn’t surprised it was a healthy thing to cherish your faults and cracks.
But what I had accepted in theory but hadn’t been able to feel until that moment, became clear and tangible as soon as I experienced it for myself: the faults are now the most precious part.
Breaking always hurts, there are no two ways around it.
But I can wish it upon everyone: to cherish your bruises as the precious things they are, and fit them back together again with a golden lining.
