YOU ARE NOT BROKEN

This blog was written by my brilliant friend, Kasim Aslam.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Instead of trying to hide or disguise brokenness, it turns it into the most beautiful feature of the piece. A perfect metaphor for life.

My experience has been that the things within me that I am the most ashamed of, those things that I seek to hide from the rest of the world (that I even try to hide from myself)… those things always stem from what I have chosen to perceive as brokenness.

Sadly, most of what I have chosen to see as broken is a perception I’ve adopted by accepting the view of myself that other people have offered to me. It’s tempting to think this only happens in childhood. I believe it’s just as easily carried into adulthood if we allow it.

Kintsugi treats breakage as a part of the pottery’s history. Something to be highlighted, not disguised. The breaks become the most beautiful and most valuable part of the piece. Even more importantly: They become the strongest, reinforced with metal instead of simply clay.

All of the broken parts of us, the chips, fissures, cracks, and breaks, those are really the things about us that are the most important. They’re the things we’ve survived. The stress tests of life. And it’s not the brokenness that’s the important part of the story…

With Kintsugi, you can’t see the brokenness any more than you can see a hole. What you see is the repair. You see the strength. You see the beauty that can only come from someone rising above their circumstances, taking ownership, and not allowing brokenness to exist.

All of the best people I know, all of the people I aspire to be like, all of the people who have or are going to change the world in a meaningful way… they were all broken. That’s what gave them the opportunity to become the type of person who could change the world. But…

They didn’t allow brokenness to be their story. Instead, they took their brokenness and used it as an opportunity to show their true strength and beauty. If you believe in God or providence or fate, you would have to assume that we break along the lines we’re predestined to conquer.

My hope for you today, and every day, is that you see the strength that comes from where you’ve broken. That you don’t ignore or try to hide it. Instead, you realize it’s not even a part of you any longer. It’s been replaced by something beautiful. Something worthy of you. Something Gold.

What do you think of this article?  Please feel free to share your comments below.