Written by Jen Liu

Recently, a beloved ceramic magnet slipped right through my fingers as I tried moving it to a different spot on my fridge. As I heard it shatter against the floor with a sonorous yet horrifying ping, my immediate reaction was to recoil sharply with self-admonishment and sadly pick up the remains, imagining them to be destined for the trash.

Then, I remembered the Japanese art of kintsugi, which involves mindfully mending broken objects with lacquer and adorning the cracks with gold. I searched the floor for the missing pieces and, a few days later, sat down to repair it.

As I carefully looked for the unique angle that allowed each part to fit back together like a puzzle, I felt myself experience the spirit of kintsugi — not so much aesthetically, especially since I was using superglue, but in my body and mind. It allowed me to respond rather than react to the breakage in that moment and gave me a vocabulary for letting go of the form that the sentimental object once took.

At the same time, kintsugi isn't meant to serve as a fix for impermanence, which isn't a problem to solve any more than gravity is. Rather, it invites us to get creative about it. And while mindfulness practice almost certainly won't help us bring our rate of breaking things down to zero percent, it can teach us to slow down, and when something breaks, move with less resistance into a space of being able to choose where to go from there.

As we welcome in a new calendar year, it can be overwhelming and poignant to reflect on all that was built and broken over the last one. From a personal to systemic to global scale, the suffering that comes along with brokenness carries a real and heavy impact that often outweighs the feeling of triumph and renewal, even if those things are happening simultaneously. And it is true too that sometimes, the best or only solution is to replace or let go, not repair.

Yet the practice of kintsugi reminds us that brokenness can be much more than a mere sign of fragility. All narratives of resilience, too, start with a fault line, for there is wisdom in the cracks.