When Things Fall Apart

On Kintsugi

Our actions may be impeded…but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. —Marcus Aurelius

“You gotta learn to love the bomb. Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why…you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift.

“Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’” —Stephen Colbert in GQ

Above: Even barbed wire can be made beautiful.

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Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending breakage with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Literally translated as "golden joinery,” the practice takes scattered shards and slowly, tenderly pieces them back together.

In defiance of our modern tendency to cast aside the imperfect and shelve the fractured, Kintsugi brings brokenness to the forefront, quite literally illuminating every crack, crevice, and nick by way of its luminescent materials.

As with pottery, so too with life.

Alongside death and taxes, existence all but guarantees suffering, heartbreak, tragedy.

These elements are near-impossible to see.

When you go about your day, you are seldom aware of the woman reeling from heartbreak, the man sliding into dementia, the terrified child en route to abusive household.

Though horrific, these things make us, are us, imbue us. They mean we have not merely existed, but instead lived.

To be human is to have warts and wrinkles and scars.

To be wise is to love each and every one.

Ashes nourish soil.

Refuse bears fruit.

Crucifixion can represent perfect love.

We are all broken in some way. That, ironically, is what makes humanity whole.

And yet, even the most twisted things can not only be rescued, but also fashioned in a new, vibrant way.

The raw material of life makes for durable wisdom. Shrapnel can make bridges and rubble buildings—you don’t need to be given something you had in you all along.

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What is broken in your life?

What experience, fatality, failure has left the constituent parts that make up your confidence or person or soul strewn far and wide?

What is so horribly torn asunder that it seems all but irredeemable?

Have the fortitude to assess the damage, scoop up the slivers, and meld them into something lasting, something beautiful. In lieu of gold, family or faith or hope or love might do the trick.

Fashion something from the wreckage of life's explosions.

Let the thorns that now make you bleed dye your rose red.

As Dostoevsky wrote in his Crime and Punishment, “Live and live well. For you’ll be needed by somebody someday.”

Feel everything. Love hard. Fight well.

Be glad to be awake; each sunrise is an opportunity.

This life has just begun.

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Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom