Im-perfectionism: the Kintsugi Way

Kintsugi bowl. Photo credit:  http://tsugi.de

 

Let me admit it.  

Sometime I walk from sunrise to sunrise with annoying sense of disgust at my own mediocrity. In my bad days I would even torture myself with heartbreaking comparisons with others, envying their successes. I am talking to my inner child patronizingly, condemning her for not taking more risks when opportunities appeared, for not being brave enough to tell out loud what I really wanted, regretting the road that I had taken and left the other unexplored. To those who shower me with praises and sweet attentions, I secretly wanting them to stop flattering and tell the bitter truth of the real me. 

Lucky it doesn’t happen every day. In my good days I make peace with all those vice voices, walk lightly with whole-hearted acceptance of my present moments. I am very good at peep talks, soothing myself out of bad thoughts and troubles, self-motivating, and end up feeling pretty much satisfied and grateful for everything there is.

But when the bad days come, I feel like a broken vase, with sign of damages and injuries over the surface, ready to be discarded. I don’t celebrate happy things happily because I always suspect something unlucky lurking in the next turn. I anticipate bad times and pamper myself from breaking by not expecting too much and not investing too much emotion. Detachment is my protection shield. I want to avoid, as much as I could, adding more cracks to the broken vase.

 

But breaking is a certainty of life. There is no one who has never experienced failure and disappointment, big or small. It can be as trivial as a sudden rain that spoils the picnic, foods that are not as delicious as it looks from the image on the menu, or failing to maintain weight after one month of fasting. 

Occasionally we also experience major shocks in important stages of our lives. Failure to pass an exam, death of a child, losing job, get cheated or betrayed by a lover. Depending on the severity of the impact, we could be cracked, we could also be like smashed into pieces.

People say that once broken, things will never be the same. Our general attitude toward broken things are to discard them. Just imagine a broken or cracked plate, glass, ceramic jar; we often just get rid of them, throwing them away as something no longer have value. Broken windows get replaced soon. Broken mirrors are considered useless since they do not provide an honest reflection of what is in front of them.  Broken trust can ruin partnership, destroy marriages, and even lead to suicide.

 

In this apparent inevitability of brokenness, I am so happy to learn about an ancient Japanese art called kintsugi, that I encountered recently in a book written by Alain de Botton:

Zen philosophers developed the view that pots, cups, and bowls that had become damaged shouldn’t simply be neglected or thrown away. They should continue to attract our respect and attention and be repaired with enormous care... The word given to this tradition is kintsugi (kin meaning 'golden', tsugi 'to join’, so literally ‘to join with gold’). The broken pieces of an accidentally smashed pots should be carefully picked up, reassembled and then glued together with lacquer inflected with a very expensive gold powder.

I will skip here about the origin and history of this art as you can easily google it.  Anyway in short, kintsugi is the art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with gold. With no attempt to disguise the damage, rather to render the fault lines beautiful and strong. Every break is unique and instead of repairing an item to make it like new, the 400-year-old technique actually highlights the "scars" as a part of the design.  

When I first read about this, I felt like wow, this is a great way of looking at flaws and imperfection in ourselves and in connection with others. It provides a beautiful metaphor and teaches an important lesson: broken things is not to be discarded, in repairing it we can actually create something more unique, beautiful and resilient. 

Tea bowl fixed in kintsugi method. Photo: Public Domain - Wikimedia

The question is which broken pottery I would want to repair and enhance. Of all imaginary pottery there is, first of all, certainly of myself. I have cracks and scars that comes from my failure complete graduate school, being disappointed by loved ones, failure to pass the scholarship selection. In my computer folder there are a lot of evidence of my failure to achieve personal goals, failed plans, unfinished concepts, half-worked scripts that are stuck at a loss of direction. There are many cracks and scars on the mediocre me.

If I had viewed myself as a broken vase, now I should start to look at each cracking line as a potential beauty to show. Pick up every pieces, put it back to rejoin it using lacquered gold. I want to master the art of kintsugi and apply it to myself. 

Kintsugi in daily life can be seen as an art of embracing imperfection, forgiveness, and self-acceptance.This broken vase of myself can be a work of art which is more valuable and having more strength after everything that have made it cracked and broken. So I tell myself, go take more risk, be bold and brave, failure and disappointment will make my vase more strong and beautiful. 

If I find something valuable in keeping connection with others, forgive the broken trust, see flaws as line of beauty that is unique of them. In the end we all become more valuable and recognize the true characters so long as we are also authentic and ready to show our own scars.  

Yes it's true, broken things might never be the same again. But it can become more valuable and stronger with kintsugi--an art of imperfectionism.

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