Many people hide their failures and painful experiences. Especially when applying for jobs, they try to present their career as a success story without any breaks. This is even though it should be clear to everyone that no personal development would take place if they always sailed carefree through life in the best possible weather. Find out what you can learn from the traditional Japanese repair method Kintsugi about dealing with fractures in life.
In his book «Regret», Daniel Pink describes how a Japanese shogun in the 15th century inadvertently promoted a new ceramic art form: a valuable Chinese tea bowl slipped out of his hands, fell to the ground and broke into several pieces. He sent the shards back to China for repair. When he received the mended bowl back months later, he was disappointed with the result: bulky metal clips held the bowl together – not a pretty look.
He was sure that there must be a better way to repair the bowl and turned to local craftsmen. They carefully sanded down the cuts and glued the pieces back together with a mixture of varnish and gold. Their aim was not to restore the bowl to its original state, but to transform it into something new and better.
There is no going back
We would also do well to handle the broken pieces a little more carefully after a break in our lives. After a failure or a stressful experience, don’t we often tend to want to return to the state before the event as if nothing had happened? Just as the bowl cannot be made whole again, we cannot turn back the wheel of life. And since we humans learn above all in a crisis, we would develop badly if we were not occasionally taken out of our comfort zone by minor and major problems. In retrospect, times of crisis often turn out to be a blessing. We wouldn’t want to miss the inevitable development that comes with the practice of life.
Be proud of your fracture points
Even if getting older is not very popular and many people would like to stay young and unharmed forever: Our inevitable fractures in life cannot be made invisible, no matter how hard we try to disguise, whitewash, or smooth them over. So, let’s wear our scars and wrinkles with pride – literally and figuratively. After all, they have made us who we are today; we have truly earned them.
According to Daniel Pink, kintsugi became so fashionable in the 17th century that people deliberately broke their tea bowls to enhance their value by repairing them. We don’t need to take the analogy that far with our own lives – our lives provide us with enough fractures of their own to become valuable.