Kintsugi of life.

I have always been fascinated by the Japanese art of restoring brokenness. It is called Kintsugi. 

The metaphor it carries (for life) is deep and rich, also reassuring. It concerns a vase, an antique or a vessel not being discarded for being broken, but restored. Not being condemned, but rehabilitated. This bodes well for a life, one as broken as yours and mine. 

Kintsugi is also about the golden joinery where cracks are joined together by lacquer mixed with gold or silver. The end product is a broken vase made whole again with its brokenness revealed, not hidden or covered. 

That's about sums up a life in this hardscrabble path of pain, sorrow, and disappointment, where triumphs and hopes are found both in the valleys and the mountaintops. 

Years ago, I read an article by author and philosopher Gary Hayden who wrote about Kintsugi. He quoted Ernest Hemingway who said "The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken pieces."

 

Life indeed challenges us all. Even the rich and powerful confront life on equal footing. Their wealth and power form shadows that haunt them at night. No one born to this groaning earth lives in a bubbled world, because the heart is rebellious and faces the prospect of brokenness. 

I recall a preacher once put a question to a class of children: ”If all the good people in the world were red and all the bad people were green, what color would you be?” One little girl thought about it and her innocent face glowed. She replied: “Reverend, I’d be streaky.” 

Mm...come to think about it, Kintsugi is about that kind of streaky. Those strips of colours covering the cracks have no particular order or pattern. It is not preset. None of our streakiness is the same. The pattern is unique to each person. Our brokenness may originate from the same source, that is, our journey in life, but it breaks us at different times and places, different seasons and spaces. 

One theologian puts it aptly: “Somewhere in each of us we’re mixture of light and darkness, of love and of hate, of trust and of fear.” 

Indeed, life makes victims of us all. Even for the rich and powerful, death, sicknesses and pain do not pass them by. 

The birth of a life is the start of this peculiar agony. We dive into living in our youth - careless and free. We dream big and hold on to the constellation of hope. We trust easily and give wholeheartedly. We suspect little and let go without doubts. 

As we grow older, with marriage and kids, with increasing responsibility on our overburdened shoulders, we start to crack at the seams. Our soul becomes weary by the heights that pride brings us with the painful plunge that awaits. Sorrow and disappointments come by like our next door neighbors and betrayal of the heart strikes like predictable storms. 

No one escapes a broken heart. Sooner or later, the delirium of youth gives way to the disillusionment of age. Epictetus once wrote: "Don't demand or expect that events happen as you would wish them to. Accept events as they actually happened. That way, peace is possible."

That's the illusion of control. It is the antithesis of contentment and peace. 

Life will not bend to our rules. We can strive for financial security but not necessarily emotional satisfaction. We can work up a healthy diet and exercise regime but are unable to stop the fatal mutation of a cell. And we can achieve academic titles but not character growth and maturity. A classroom does not prepare us for a world that stokes our innermost appetites and set fire to our hidden lusts. 

Life plays no favourites too. Even at times, what you sow is not what you wish you reap. This is another control fallacy - to think you can micromanage choices so that the consequences are ringfenced and well tamed.

Well, reality check, life is not a well-managed zoo where our animalistic emotions are neatly caged for merely display purposes. They break out sometimes and run wild when circumstances (as we age) grow beyond our expectation and control. The fear of death makes anxious freaks out of all of us. 

And at some point, faith will test you. Hope will leave you. And love, especially love, will break you. They will conspire to stretch you to breaking point. Like a vase or a vessel, you will crack; some pieces will fall off. 

Alas, I return to kintsugi - the Japanese art of restoring broken antiques. The point of Kintsugi for me is that life is not one red-carpeted glam walk from start to end. Not even close. For we can very well determine the color of our sail, but never the tides, winds and waves while at sea.

Here, I recall this, blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in light. Indeed, an insulated life is an alienated life that never grows because it is never tested. It takes comfort in the dimness of its own limited experiences, or worse, deluded expectations. 

And if experiencing and embracing love is the summation of a good life, then love will not leave us the way we are, that is, dependent and deluded, immature and empty. 

Love will test and break us. Love will leave us open and vulnerable. Love takes us out of our comfort self to share and sacrifice with others. Love joins our heart with another and doubles the exposure. It also doubles the overcoming. 

Yet, the cracks grow us. Brokenness steels us. And the wounds empower us. Like the lacquer-streak of gold or silver in kintsugi, it reminds us how far we have come and how much we have grown. For we may come out streaky, but that is the messy colours of resilience. 

Mind you, resilience does not come from unbrokenness. It comes with each piece restored to become one whole. Brokenness as a community thus holds us together better than the arrogance of invulnerability, where we are set apart from the community. 

For that's the kintsugi of life, and the goal of living and overcoming, not with a heart unbroken, but one made whole, made stronger and made with depth of compassion, by brokenness.