Kintsugi: An art that has a lot to teach you about life and yourself

Today’s world is a rich composition of expectations and goals. You are constantly chasing desires.

You want to get somewhere, to conquer something. Difficulties and obstacles make the goals drift away, causing you a constant anxiety, but also a sense of failure if you don’t manage to succeed in everything, like another superhero.

In reality, though, failure is part of life. And what you have to do is to accept this perspective to be able to move on.

If you let the feeling of failure accompany you, you will burden your psychology with an unnecessary burden. There is a way, through various practices and methods, to work on it and overcome it.

Such a real one is also Japanese art form kintsugi, meaning union with gold. It has attracted intense attention in recent years as a technique, but also as a symbol of how you can go about life.

After all, many Japanese art forms have been influenced by Zen and Mahayana philosophies, which support notions of accepting imperfection, as well as the idea that everything is transitory.

Kintsugi deals with the repair of broken vessels. When something breaks, instead of throwing it away, Kintsugi craftsmen reattach the fragments by gluing them together with a tree sap, while the cracks are decorated with gold. Instead of trying to hide the crack, they accentuate it.

This practice quickly became popular, as it symbolically identified with the idea that imperfection hides beauty. The fragments of a broken object create a wonderful opportunity to create something new.

So, if you face a failure with this reasoning, then its “color” can take on completely different dimensions in your life.

An interesting story

Kintsugi was quite popular in Japan around the late 16th and early 17th centuries, however the origins of this aesthetic go back hundreds of years. Legend has it that the ruler of the time, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, broke his favorite tea bowl, which was unique and impossible to replace. Refusing to throw it away, he commissioned his craftsmen to repair it. In the effort to make something beautiful out of the broken pieces, without however hiding the cracks, kintsugi was born.

Discovering the beauty in imperfection

The logic of Kintsugi is not to restore the object to its original form, but to make it look beautiful again, even after the damage it has suffered. The imperfection, the golden cracks, are what make the new object unique. It is there every time you look at it and it evokes memories of the past, which has been successfully overcome. It defies expectations because it goes beyond repairing an object by intentionally changing its appearance.

The art of kintsugi is inextricably linked to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi: a worldview focused on accepting transience, imperfection and the beauty found in simplicity. Wabi-sabi also reminds us that nothing stays the same forever.

In an age of mass production and conformity, learning to accept and celebrate the imperfect is a ‘weapon’. You can turn your frustrations into strength. Your self after every failure is certainly not perfect, but it remains beautiful in a new way. Instead of trying to hide your imperfections, highlight them and reveal the beauty they hide. This is the logic of kintsugi art.

The bowl, like the soul, may seem broken, the pieces scattered, but don’t forget: Through the cracks comes pure gold.

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