line your flaws with gold

In Japan, when things are broken they are often repaired using gold. This is called kintsukuroi. The flaw doesn’t make the object ugly, instead, it only adds to its beauty. The ‘flaw’ is considered to be a unique part of the object’s history. I found this rather consoling. The idea that we can be more beautiful when we are broken.

Today many of us are concerned with chasing perfection. We like to count our flaws. Line them all up neatly as we think of all the ways we can correct them. We aspire to unattainable ideals of perfection and chastise ourselves and each other when we cannot live up to them. We worship perfection. Look for symmetry, immaculateness and excellence in all that we do. When we inevitably fail to achieve the impossible, we hurt ourselves and in doing so, and we hurt others. 

While frantically looking for an idea to complete my copywriting assignment, I unwittingly stumbled into the notion of Wabi-sabi. Wabi originally was used to discern a feeling of loneliness that comes from living in nature, far from society. Sabi is described as chill, lean or withered, sharing a deliberate similarity in pronunciation with the Japanese word for rust. It is a Japanese philosophy that embraces the beauty of the imperfect, the rustic and the melancholy. It is born from a respect for the transience of things, and the beauty of the ephemeral, the fragile and the melancholy. There is something to be said for embracing our flaws. It may be a cliché, but like many clichés it is true. I found it incredibly beautiful and comforting that an entire art form exists purely to celebrate things most of us want to destroy. Things most of us think aren’t worth looking at. That even the broken histories are not to be hidden but treasured.

At times I catch myself finding solace in all my imperfections, in my sadness. I think in doing this I am embracing some form of Wabi-sabi. I think it is important to befriend your demons and find that they may not be demons after all, but friends. Self-love is loving all of yourself, even the not so good parts.