REFLECTION

From Broken to Becoming

How growing through traumas can make us better.

As I poured down hot water from the small porcelain teapot into my coffee cup, I forgot to enjoy the “slowness” of the moment and rushed, trying to get more water to flow.

The almost vertical tilt of the teapot made the lid fall off to the concrete floor below and break into two pieces.

My first reaction was to discard the broken lid. After all, I didn’t really need it. I could still use the teapot or simply replace it with a new one.

That was my first thought — a reaction to the situation. But my feeling was quite different. Seeing the two broken pieces of the lid on the floor made me think of a new word I had learned a few weeks back.

Kintsugi.

It is a Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together — also a metaphor for embracing your flaws and imperfections.

I had first learned about this concept after reading a powerful article on self-love by Shalu Bajaj Ahuja.

Now the lid was broken in two. Was it my moment to practice Kintsugi?

Then it occurred to me I must first embrace this moment of “brokenness” which allowed for Kintsugi. Embrace the part where things break down. Where we break down. Where I break down.

As these thoughts were going through my head, I put down the teapot and held still for a moment to really look at the broken pieces of the lid. Then I picked them up from the floor and placed them on the kitchen counter.

How beautiful it was to feel myself observing these two broken pieces with meaning. Once, these two pieces were one and served a specific function. No more. The piece was now broken.

There was the possibility of creating something new with these broken pieces. It had to be something new because there was no way to get the same piece back again. The new piece would have cracks that would be highlighted with glue. This is how the new “whole” would look like. This was Kintsugi.

And it could only be done with the power of love and the acceptance of reality, by the artist.

Yes, I have decided to keep those two pieces of the broken lid on my kitchen counter for a while before I glue them. I am taking the moment to appreciate what is broken and bathe in the excitement of putting them together to create something entirely new out of the same materials.

They will be entirely new because their cracks will be highlighted by the glue.

It makes me think of my own past. Those times I felt broken and grew out of them. Some of that brokenness is still there, and I am growing as I learn to go right to the middle of brokenness. The traumas, the tragedies…to stay there, feel the pain, cry, embrace the experience and slowly grow.

I become a Kintsugi, over and over again.

This light is there. Always.

Eventually, going deep and going through this process makes me realize that being broken also allows me to re-create myself. There is a whole new meaning, a different way of life we feel when we glue together pieces that disintegrated.

Those cracks of our Kintsugi tell stories of our past. The new forms we create gluing together pieces allow us to mine the love that is always there — deep down in abundance.

Flaws and imperfections are really an illusion, we realize. The broken pieces really were tools to help us guide towards discovering our self-love.

We are truly capable of feeling whole and beautiful as we slowly put together our broken pieces, glue those cracks meticulously with our bare hands.

Through those broken parts, the cracks, the glue highlights, we experience our vulnerabilities. Through those vulnerabilities, we find new friends who are living their own stories and their own dreams that somehow merge with ours. In sharing those vulnerabilities, we keep our purpose alive.

And we become.