Those days when the nights seem to never end and the days drag on… The beat in your chest races then fades away. And little by little there is a faint, dim light that keeps fading too. And your only hope now is that it doesn’t go all the way out.
You pull, it tugs. You let go at the wrong time. Timing is everything. And no matter what you do, you just can’t pull it all back together.
Being human includes broken pieces. The ones that shatter or break into a million pieces. The ones you don’t even know you can find to put back together again.
And it includes the pieces that break in half or thirds. And sometimes, the ones that crack, that you can just start to see the separation but don’t come all the way apart.
There are a thousand ways to break something. And big or small, it feels broken. Scratched. Damaged.
And through those broken pieces we mend. We find out how strong we are when we figure out how to keep it together… when we don’t want anyone to see. When we are vulnerable and real and authentic. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, being real doesn’t mean you are perfect… quite the contrary. Being real means you are loved, and your parts are worn and oftentimes tattered. Being real means you break. Maybe not in a million pieces, but in thirds. And as you break, so can you mend.
There is a tradition in Japan called Kintsugi. This is when a piece of ceramic breaks or cracks, and the repair technique is to cover those cracks and breaks by repairing them with gold or silver or platinum. There is a beauty in the broken, and the Japanese see the joining of the pieces back together as part of the ceramic’s history… part of it’s journey. Not something to cover up and hide or be embarrassed about. In a society that throws broken things away, what a beautiful idea to see something for what it is and find the beauty in all of it. To mend the broken pieces with something even more aesthetically pleasing and valuable than the ceramic piece started out as.
Just like the moments that create our path, the stories we tell ourselves, the broken parts we feel we are made of… to embrace those parts for the beauty they hold. to make them more beautiful for the fact that they are broken, and to mend them by “joining” the pieces, not in trying to “fix” them… this is the beauty in the imperfection of our own humanity.
This compassion and awareness to the things we don’t control… to that which is outside of ourselves, and to those pieces we hold onto and can’t let go is the gold that hold us together. It’s the love that joins us, not tries to throw us away for being broken.
And perhaps the truth is we aren’t broken at all, and therefore need no fixing.
We are all just pieces of ourselves, that when highlighted in gold are so much more beautiful for being real and authentic.
We know we are worthy of so much more when we are real. When we break and join back together. When we see ourselves for what we are in all of our vulnerability. Even when we feel broken…
And it is through those broken pieces that we mend.
And we become more and more beautiful each time.
