Kintsugi

He was in his pottery shop when it began.

At first, he didn’t feel anything. He was at the counter, poring over the ledger of his opening year, when he heard the tinkling sound of ceramic rattling together. A glance upward confirmed his suspicions: his precious pottery, the fruit of his labor, was shaking on the shelves. The moment he came to that realization, he noticed that the floor beneath him, too, had started to tremble.

It was a potter’s worst nightmare.

There was no time to think. His first instinct was to secure his most valuable pieces: the commissions. They were irreplaceable, for they were custom-made to the clients’ tastes. Redoing them would take far too long, and disappointing his customers would spell the end of his budding business.

Fighting the unsteady floor, he ran to the storage room as fast as his feet could take him and, lacking a better method of protection, used his jacket to wrap the commissions in a bundle. Once that was done he almost felt some relief, but the ear-piercing sound of ceramic crashing on the floor reminded him of one very special vase he had been neglecting.

He resisted the urge to stop and pick up the shards as he hurried out of the storeroom, past some smaller pieces that were already beyond saving. He had just made those last week, he noted with dismay, and they had been selling well. Still, his favorite piece weighed much heavier on his mind.

It felt like an eternity until his storefront came into view, and he let out a cry when he saw that the large, intricate vase was wobbling on its display stand.

That vase was his senior year project: his magnum opus. He had poured his heart and soul into its creation over the course of an entire year; every indent, every carving, every stroke of glaze was done with intention. It hadn’t won any awards and it wouldn’t be worth anything if he tried to sell it, but to him it was irreplaceable, almost like a child.

There was still time to save it; he was just a few meters away. With that thought in mind, he moved to secure it, but just as he took the final step to close the gap between him and his prized possession, the ground lurched like it hadn’t before.

The man and the vase fell together, one with a thud and the other with a crash.

~~~~~

The earthquake had long subsided, but the potter was still on the floor, unmoving. His vase and heart were in pieces.

With what little strength he had, he picked up the shards on the floor, one by one, and held them up next to each other. They fit together perfectly, like pieces of a puzzle. He didn’t have it in him to throw them away, so instead he stacked them together in a little pile and picked up his phone.

“How to repair a broken vase,” he typed into the search bar with little hope. Try as he might, what was done could not be undone. He scrolled past useless advice after useless advice, until suddenly he was surprised with a method he had completely forgotten about.

Kintsugi: the Japanese art of repairing pottery. Instead of attempting to hide the damage, it embraced it, covering the cracks in gold like a fighter who wears his scars with pride. What was done could not be undone, but why should it? Damage is proof of resilience—of going through suffering and making it out alive.

He looked at the mess of shards on the floor. It would take a while to put them all together, and it would never be what it once was. But maybe, just maybe, they would both come out stronger from it all.