MENDING WITH INTENT: KINTSUGI AND THE BEAUTY OF REPAIR

JANUARY 31ST, 2022

Illustrated by: Karolin Eks.

You drop a bowl of steaming instant ramen all over the floor, shattering the Ikea ceramic into a few chunks and a thousand shards. What do you do with those chunks? 

Most would simply fling them into the trash, forgetting their existence. But you reading this, you have good taste. That bowl was a pretty one, and it would be a shame to throw it out. On top of that, replacing the broken bowl is not exactly environmentally conscious. Perhaps instead you whip out the superglue and clumsily reattach the chucks to each other, ignoring the seams whenever you use it again. 

THE ART OF EMBRACING IMPERFECTION

You probably wouldn’t think to repair the damage with literal gold. Kintsugi is the art of doing just that, emphasising the beauty of a broken object by accepting its damage. To quote Wikipedia: “As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.”

While Kintsugi is itself a form of repair, it needs not to be limited to this narrow application. Kitchenware isn’t the only object which can have its history shown through damage, and the method of lacquering pieces together is itself similar to the process of patching holes in clothing. 

Equally, the history of your clothes is itself your history. Any damage that you disguise with a patch is a part of your own history that you’re denying. On a less sombre note, it’s a fun way to wear your stories on your sleeve; literally. 

THE BEAUTY OF REPAIR

Now imagine you’re taking a girl, a guy or whoever you like on a first date. The plan is to take a moped through the rain-soaked Amsterdam streets, with them clinging to your back. You, in this case, are also an idiot and you drive with the wanton abandon of a hyperactive macaque monkey. You’ve also never ridden in the rain before. 

Naturally, the moped flies away from you both as you slip on a well-placed tram track. After hurriedly getting both your date and the moped off the road, you check each-other for injury; the clothes took the hit, leaving you both unscathed.  

With the (surprisingly successful) date over, your mind falls on the issue of your coat’s new holes. The damage is not so bad as to outright trash it, and you could hide the damage (almost) completely. To do so would take a lot of effort though, carefully grafting material from unseen areas means time, time better spent without procrastination. 

On top of that, it’s fun to have a good story about a first date, and this coat is an embodiment of exactly that story. So, follow the principle of Kintsugi, create beauty out of the damage, and tell the story of the coat’s life. Don’t hide it, patch with intent. And that’s the moral of the story: if ever you find yourself in this absurdly specific scenario, you know what to do. But more generally, we should adopt the philosophy of Kintsugi of accepting the history of things rather than hiding them. 

FINAL STAGE: ACCEPTANCE

On that note of covering up history, why cover up the history unfolding around us? That’s right, it’s time for the obligatory relation of this concept to the pandemic. The new normal is, I think we can all agree, not great. There’s a not insignificant number of us who would gladly wish that this past year never happened, that we could wipe it from history and forget it. 

But we cannot, the pandemic happened, and we should accept it as part of our history. Whilst not ‘damage’ in the same way that kintsugi suggests, the new normal has brought with it both a great deal of pain, alongside new methods of coping, and brought to light the failings of systems and mindsets once held. 

So, instead of denying the struggles, and forgetting they ever happened, we should remember them; what we learned from both highs and (the more common) lows. Don’t allow the damage to force your hand, don’t throw out your past, repair yourself with gold, make yourself whole and let your history shine.