Thank you, Sophie, for telling me about kintsugi, which is a Japanese art form where broken pottery is repaired with gold, silver, or platinum, which highlights rather than hide the broken bits. The philosophy behind the technique is to incorporate the repair into the new pottery piece and the result is often a piece that is more beautiful than the original.
Kintsugi really sums up everything I believe about pain and trauma: after loss, grief or heartache we are not the same but we are beautiful in a different (and I believe, more interesting) way.
The same idea was expressed by the 13th century Persian poet, Rumi, who wrote: “Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That is where the light enters you”
The recently deceased poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen, articulated the notion that it is our struggles that allows us to gain wisdom in his song Anthem: “There is a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in”
In Buddhist philosophy, the same idea is expressed with the “the lotus in the mud” picture. The lotus is a beautiful, elegant flower but it grows in murky pond water. In other words, out of our darkness (the mud) grows wisdom and beauty (the lotus flower)
In the field of psychology, the idea that adversity can lead to psychological development is referred to – less poetically perhaps – as post traumatic growth.
So the difficulties in life can break us – sometimes just a tiny crack and other times it shatters us into a thousand pieces. Either way, we are not the same as before but we can be beautiful in new, unique and interesting ways.