Are you looking desperately at the shards of your life? Did you break your most beautiful years with ignorance and indifference? Do you sometimes look at the pieces and ask yourself how you can save them? It would be so simple to take the dustpan and gather everything up, take it out to the trash and start from scratch. But it is impossible and there’s no need for it. What you’ve broken doesn’t need to be hidden or thrown away!
Try Kintsukuroi instead, an Asian Art which can be translated as “repair with gold”. The technique is both ingenious and effective, proving that a work is no less valuable or less beautiful if it doesn’t look exactly the same as it was originally designed. Kintsukuroi artists transform broken ceramics in wonderful works of art, using an epoxy lacquer based on gold, to fill in the gaps in the broken vessels. The result is amazing, both from an aesthetic point of view, but also regarding its endurance in time. Each crack is artistically filled in with gold and so the vessel becomes more beautiful, especially because it has been broken before.
People are the same.
Sometimes, when everything we’ve built, valued and loved for years breaks to pieces, we are capable of seeing new possibilities that we wouldn’t have seen before, if life had followed our desired trajectory. Facing the broken promises, destroyed commitments, fears and mistakes, our own failures or disappointments caused by the interaction with others, we realize that we can be stronger. Sometimes, traumas bring us closer to God and to the purpose of our existence, helping us become wiser, more thankful and closer to people. Our and others’ life experiences show us that we are stronger than we thought and that we can adapt to the hardest situations. There are also some who never completely recover after dealing with a trauma, but this is just because they have refused to collect the pieces and allow themselves be repaired. However, in most of the cases, after pain and fight, there’s a recovery time and then a continuation of life under happy auspices. It is not a vain promise, but a reality proven time and time again by people whose lives broke to pieces, but who now sparkle. The idea that people can shine stronger after suffering does not allow us to make mistakes to test people or to test ourselves, but it is a sign that there’s still hope. People can flourish in the face of terror, love despite disappointment, forgive and dream despite the loss surrounding them. They can continue to have faith and create new vessels, glued with gold.
It is often hard to identify the exact moment when your life becomes smithereens and smoke. In most cases this doesn’t happen all of a sudden, but if in this moment your life is broken, if you feel attacked from all sides, you need to admit that you have failed, gather the chippings and try to rearrange them, repair them, fill the gaps and wonder at the result. Gold is the symbol of the Divine, of royalty, of endless well-being. If your life is broken, look for gold to glue it back together. If you find yourself in the mud, look for the stars. Or for their Creator.
In Isaiah 57:17 God speaks to you: “I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite”. What a wonderful promise!
