Embracing life’s imperfections

Lessons from kintsugi

When I rebooted this blog in March of 2023 (archived posts here), my intention was that I would no longer try to keep a given cadence of writing as I’d done prior. I’d post when it felt right, and try to keep things more casual. It’s been a super busy summer so I haven’t felt compelled to blog. With much of that activity now behind us, an idea came to me that I wanted to share.

Wikipedia defines kintsugi (Japanese: 金継ぎ, lit. 'golden joinery') as “the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with urushi lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.” After one of our cats broke a ceramic bowl by pushing it off an end table, I had the idea to order an inexpensive kintsugi kit from Amazon to repair it. I’d never done it before, but I really like the way kintsugi looks and figured it was a safe experiment.

After a few hard-learned lessons (take your time, mix the epoxy well, and do one piece at a time), my efforts yielded what I think is a passable result. I certainly know what I’d do differently next time. And now have our bowl back and perhaps we’ll move it to a more cat-friendly place where it can steer clear of any zoomies-related calamities :) Yesterday, as I was looking at the bowl, it struck me that kintsugi’s deceptively simple philosophical meaning was worth sharing.

Our lives are of course an amalgamation of our many experiences over the years. I won’t claim that it’s a perfect Gaussian / bell curve distribution, but if we collect all that occurs over our time vertical on this planet, that’s not a bad model. Most of these experiences are pretty mundane, and rate somewhere between “a little crappy” to “pretty decent”. And then we have the tails of that distribution - on one side, the truly amazing, joyous, and overwhelmingly positive memories, and on the other, those which are tragic, sad, and sometimes horribly painful. But they are all a part of who we are as individuals and play a role in forming our identities. Every one of these experiences has value, whether we realize it at the time or not.

Leaving my career behind has given me the gift of a lot of time for reflection. As other retirees I’ve corresponded with have agreed, when we finally stop spending the majority of our waking hours in the grind, we more often take advantage of the time to simply think. Whether you employ formal meditation (highly recommended!), long walks, or some other mechanism to spend time alone with your thoughts, that reflection is remarkably valuable. And you certainly don’t need to wait until you’re retired to take it.

Between the time spent thinking, the days I spent walking the Camino, and through talking with a therapist, I’ve learned a lot about myself. Not all of those discoveries were easy to confront, that’s for sure. But I now welcome the lessons that come my way, and actively try to improve based on them. As a human I’ve made many mistakes, done and seen much, and made positive and negative contributions to the world around me. Despite (or in part because of) our big brains, we humans are pretty complex and far from perfect. But through understanding, acceptance, and learning from all our experiences - not suppressing or denying them, I truly believe that we become a better whole.

I hope this post finds you well. I wish you all the best and thank you as always for being on the journey with me. Mahalo. 🙏