Kintsugi — Finding the beauty in flaws

Day 158 / 365

The picture you see above is of an old Japanese ceramic bowl. Do you see the golden lines on it? That’s actual gold filled in between the cracks in the bowl! This is a long old Japanese tradition known as Kintsugi. In this, broken ceramics are repaired by using powdered gold or silver.

There are several ideas in the philosophy of Kintsugi, and we can learn a lot from it.

The first being that the act of being broken was a part of the history of the object. If we would have repaired it normally, and painted over the cracks, this history of the object will be forgotten. But by filling the cracks with bright gold or silver, both the breakage and repair remain the part of the object's history.

Secondly, Kintsugi teaches us that instead of being embarrassed by our flaws we should embrace them with pride. It’s these prominent golden cracks that add to the beauty of the object.

And lastly, these cracks are a reminder of how fragile life itself is, and how it doesn’t make sense to have any attachment to immaterial things. It teaches us to value impermanence.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — The Pygmalion Effect