We, as humans are collectors of stuff. We collect material and immaterial things like money, furniture, clothes, friends and memories with a pride in our accumulative numbers. But one collection we are reluctant to share and more apt to hide than to flaunt is our collection of scars. Of the flesh or of the heart, scars are events in life that have dealt us considerable damage. After a few cuts, we call ourselves things like "broken," or refer to ourselves as weighted by emotional baggage. And once broken, we begin to think of ourselves as less valuable. Who can blame us? Our whole economic system works under the premise that we replace what is outdated and damaged with something new and unmarred. To use a modern example, a cracked iPhone is less valuable to us than an iPhone with a flawless screen, despite the fact that both function the same. The cracks are no fun to look at, perhaps they remind us of the mistake that caused the cracks to appear in the first place, so we replace the cracked screen with an unbroken one.

However, an ancient Japanese tradition called Kintsugi begs us to reconsider our negativity and shame towards flaws. In the art of Kintsugi, broken pottery is repurposed by mending cracks with a lacquer that contains valuable metals such as gold, silver, and platinum. The result is a beautiful gold highlighting and tracing the damaged area the pottery endured. Instead of being tossed out, the ceramic piece is restored for continued use, all the while unabashedly flaunting its former state of brokenness. The philosophy behind Kintsugi emphasizes that these cracks are simply an event in the life of the object, not the end of it. The cracks do not render the object useless, rather it gives the object an opportunity to show its flaws and damage in a beautiful way.

Kintsugi's philosophy reaches beyond ceramics and touches at the heart of human life and our curtained collection of scars. I find this philosophy so applicable after observing the parallels between the development of a ceramic work and a human life. Both lives begin in states of malleability. For a ceramic life it is the yielding clay sculpted by the hands and for humans, it is our yielding minds sculpted by our family and schooling. Then, patterns are imprinted. Humans develop habits and hobbies while a ceramic piece takes on a design. Until, eventually, both the ceramic piece and the human are hardened in one way or another and left vulnerable to being broken. This is where Kintsugi teaches us how we might deal with our hidden collection of flaws and scars. The art form tells us not to hide our flaws, but to embrace imperfections as undeniable parts of life, not signs of an end but markers of former events. Kintsugi teaches us that just because we might be a little cracked, does not mean we are irreversibly broken. We mend ourselves with what we find valuable -- family, friends, books, and learn to focus not on the damage that marked us but rather on the resilience that allowed us to move forward.