“The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places.” ~Ernest Hemingway
We all get broken in one way or another in this life. It’s an unavoidable part of living.
If nothing else, we all get our hearts broken at one time or another and bits of our souls get broken off as we learn to conform to the expectations of the world around us and as we try to protect ourselves from the wounds that all lives bring.
We may not get to choose what gets broken, but we do have a choice about how we handle those breaks.
Sometimes we get stuck in the brokenness and never heal, rehearsing the same old stories over and over again.
Other times we may try to pretend the brokenness is not there, driving it into our shadow where we act it out toward others without knowing why.
Or we can do the hard work that’s required to not only heal the broken places, but to make those places stronger than they were before. It is then that our scars become beautiful in the way they allow us to bring healing to the world around us.
Kintsugi is a wonderful metaphor for this last way of dealing with the broken places that life gives all of us, and I use that image as a means of honoring and supporting the repair of the broken places in all of our lives.
Kintsugi living is about embracing our healing and finding the gold in our scars so that we can use that gold in aid of the healing of the world around us.