This is a Japanese Kintsugi soba cup. Repairs are done using tree sap and gold fill, making the piece even more valuable. It is a centuries old practice that celebrates the imperfection in this fragile human life. Our bodies and spirits may become worn out, damaged and traumatized but are still of value. The places we are broken show our willingness to be present in suffering. The work to rebuild and repair ourselves shows our willingness to restore and heal. We will always be different than when we were inexperienced. Post-traumatic growth is the process or being open to connecting with others and creating interesting expressions of self. We were given the gift of life but many wish to return it. Life is tough and the learnings are etched into your soul. Painful wisdom. What may look like a failing in this lifetime may be an experience that the soul needed. This is why t is impossible to judge others.
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
Louise Erdrich
Perfection is fake. It doesn’t allow a person the full experience of being human. Being human is messy. It blunders, it cries, it does not know everything, it has bad days. Allow others to see you and help you. If they judge you for being in your truth that has nothing to do with your integrity. Having vulnerabilities is part of life. You will never arrive at a place of perfection. There will always be more to know and ways to improve. You must live in the now. This is why they say, “Dance in the rain.” There are plenty of reasons to be angry and miserable. Instead choose to make the most of it.
Connect to others. Our imperfections are opportunities to appreciate other in an unconditional way. When you see that even seemingly perfect people have problems and areas of growth, you see them more clearly and can relate to them more deeply. Even though human interactions are flawed and painful at times, they are as they are. Life will continue- “as is,” and it is your job to allow that.
“Let someone love you the way you are – as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe that you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.”
Mark Hack