— Ernest Hemingway
Imaginable, cracked, and seemingly useless. Now, most of us would toss it out, but what if instead, those cracks were mended with gold, transforming the broken object into something even more beautiful than before? This is the art of Kintsugi, a Japanese philosophy that teaches us how to embrace flaws and failures as opportunities for growth and transformation. Today, we'll explore how this perspective aligns with Stoicism, and how it can help us turn failure and loss into resilience and strength.
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
—Ernest Hemingway.
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Highlighting the cracks rather than hiding them. It's a philosophy that celebrates imperfection and sees beauty in repair and transformation. While the origins of kintsugi are unknown, there's a popular tale where the Japanese shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa, after breaking his favorite Chinese tea bowl, sent it back to China to have it repaired.
It was returned with metal staples holding the pieces together. Unsatisfied with the look of it, he instructed artisans to find a more aesthetically pleasing way to repair it. They used clay and gold to repair it, and the golden repair elevated the bowl to an object of art.
So both Kintsugi and Stoicism teach us that failure and loss are inevitable. The Stoics call us to embrace these experiences as part of life rather than resist them. Through the lens of Kintsugi, the cracks and the wear and tear on an object are there to highlight the life of the object, and that nothing is permanent or perfect. We often feel like our lives are a failure if things aren't perfect.
It's the attachment to these expectations of perfection that often causes a lot of suffering in our lives. Life is never going to be perfect. There will always be challenges and setbacks. By taking time to change our expectations and our perspective, we can take the hits that come our way because we aren't holding on to these ideas of how things should be.
We take things as they are, and appreciate the scars and the wounds from our experiences and the wisdom that we gain. So this aligns really well with the Stoic principle of amor fati, meaning to “love your fate”, which encourages us to accept and even love the cracks and broken things in our lives. The Stoics recognize that by learning to love everything that happens to us, then we are going to be much more resilient when those things come our way.
Rather than cursing the things that happen to us, we recognize that, first off, these things are going to happen to us anyway. By developing an attitude of loving everything that happens to us, we can see how those challenges and the things that break us show us where our weak points are and teach us how to be stronger.
It's like Epictetus said:
“Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to. Rather wish that what happens, happens the way it happens. Then you will be happy.”
Cracks as Beauty
Kintsugi teaches us how to view imperfections not as flaws, but as the markers of resilience in history. Similarly, Stoicism teaches us to change how we perceive challenges and to see them as opportunities to learn and to make choices. Think about it—if you've never failed at anything in your life, you're not really living. You're playing it safe. The more you play it safe, the more you are avoiding your potential.
Nothing worthwhile is ever achieved without taking risks. Risks mean that you have a chance at failure, but that's where life gets exciting. It's like Epictetus also said:
“The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain the reputation from storms and tempests.”
Think about your favorite adventure stories. The ones that are the most exciting are the ones that are usually the most perilous. Well, the chance of failure is great, and you know the heroes won't come out unscathed. For example, in Lord of the Rings, if Frodo and Sam and the rest of the Fellowship just walked right into Mordor and were able to throw the ring into the lava without all the challenges they went through, it would have been an incredibly boring story.
It was because of how dangerous the journey was and all of the failures and setbacks they overcame that kept us watching and cheering for the heroes. Life is the same. And the thing is, you will have scars and scratches along the journey, but each of those has a story to tell.
For me, I've talked a lot about how my childhood was quite a struggle because my dad was often angry and violent, and for a long time in my life, I felt like I was broken because of this. But over time, I learned to realize that that challenge of living with all of the kind of these, this feeling of brokenness was something that made me much more empathetic to other people. It made it so that when other people were struggling, I could really understand what type of struggles they had.
It also taught me a lesson of learning how to love my father, even though he had done these violent things to me growing up. And that was something that took a bit of time and understanding, but it learned. But I learned to have empathy for the struggles that he had growing up and try to understand things from his point of view.
And while I don't absolve him of the things that he did, I can at least have compassion and understanding for the challenges that he had in his life that he never really was able to overcome before he died. It's like Marcus Aurelius said:
“If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it.”
When we recognize that it's our perspective on these things, and that we can change our perspective on it, something at any time, then we recognize that we are in control of our lives, and that we can choose to see the beauty in the broken things. Next, I want to talk about embracing permanence and change.
Embracing Impermanence and Change
So Kintsugi reflects the philosophy of wabi-sabi, which embraces the impermanence and imperfection of life. This aligns with the Stoic understanding that everything in life is transient. Rather than trying to maintain something at a pristine state, we understand that everything is going to suffer, wear and tear, and eventually will no longer exist.
By embracing the impermanence of everything, we release our attachment of needing things to stay the same. We appreciate and we celebrate change. A good way to do this is to practice the Stoic principle of “premeditatio malorum”, which helps prepare for loss and change by imagining the loss and change that's going to happen beforehand, so that we're not shattered when these things occur.
Repairing with Gold
Resilience is the process of mending our emotional cracks with something even stronger, like the gold and clay in Kintsugi. Have you ever met somebody that has never really had to struggle for anything in their lives? While we think that this might be a preferable life, those that never have to struggle through anything aren't prepared for when something really challenging comes their way.
It's like a warrior who has never seen battle. Can they really call themselves a warrior? How will they handle pressure if they've never had to struggle? Would you want them on your team in a battle? Those who have faced up to hard things, taken them on, and prevailed, are the ones that you want to have in your back.
Build Back Stronger
I want you to think of those times where you've felt like you've been broken from a different perspective. Think of those places that you've been broken where you, as something where you found a weakness and once it's repaired, it's can be even stronger than it was before.
Now I know that some people have the idea that everything happens to you for a reason, but that's not what I mean by this. Things happen. Life happens. There's no great being out there in the universe making things, these things happen to you. They just happen. But those experiences that you went through helped you to figure out how to strengthen those areas.
The thing is, is that you need experiences in order to grow. I mean, how would you develop courage if you were never in a position that called for courage? How would you know if you were wise if you never had to make any tough decisions? This is what Marcus Aurelius means when he wrote:
”The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
It's by having these challenges that are there that we actually make progress. If there was nothing to challenge us, then we would never grow. An example of someone who turned loss into purpose is Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps and set out to find meaning in the suffering that he and his fellow Jews had suffered during the Holocaust.
Rather than letting it destroy his life, he looked for ways to take the experience and to help himself and others to work through the grief, practice forgiveness, and in turn, give meaning to their lives.
Stoicism and the Power of Reflection
The Stoics advocate daily reflection as a way to recognize and repair the cracks in our thinking and our actions. This mirrors the intentionality of Kintsugi, where you repair the cracks to make them even more beautiful and stronger than they were before. As an example, Marcus Aurelius used his meditations as a way to process his thoughts and to help and continually refine his character. So we can take these ideas and apply them a little more practically.
We can practice acceptance by acknowledging the breakage in your life instead of denying it. That we look at those things as not a place of weakness or that we're a failure, but as something that points out something that needs us to reinforce it and to give it some attention. Next, we can identify what lessons or growth we want to take from a challenge.
If we simply go through things and we never take the time to sit down and reflect on what we can learn from them, then we're missing a great opportunity to turn something that might be considered a tragedy into something that makes us stronger and even better. Next, we need to actually take action on that. We need to take steps to rebuild ourselves using that experience as a source of strength. It's like Marcus Aurelius reminds us:
“To recover your life is in your power. See things anew, and you are free again.”
Lessons from Kintsugi and Stoicism
So the final lesson that I want you to take away from is that the cracks in our lives don't diminish us. They make us more unique, more human, and often even stronger than before. So, when I meet someone who has overcome challenges and struggles, I find them far more interesting than someone who has never really had to struggle in life. I know in my own life, it was the challenging things that I've had to overcome that have been the places for me that have brought about the most growth.
Without the struggles and the need to find a way to build back better, I would have remained in the same place of reactivity and feeling like a victim of circumstances. So what I'd like you to take away from this episode is that you've used setbacks as an opportunity to rebuild stronger. That rather than looking at them as a place where you failed, look at it as a place where you recognize that there was some weakness and you can take that and you can make it stronger than it was before.
It's like the challenges are the things that point out the places where you need to be a little bit stronger. Next, embrace your imperfections. They aren't things that are awful about you. They simply tell your story. No one in life is ever going to get through unscathed because no one's ever perfect.
And life is not going to be perfect. So embrace those imperfections. Lastly, make sure that you practice gratitude for the lessons that the hardships teach. Again, by having the hardships there, It allows us to practice virtue by giving us these difficult things that are in our lives. Then it gives us opportunities to be courageous and to be wise and to practice justice and treat other people well.
It's like Epictetus said: “Difficulty shows men what they are.”
Conclusion
So in conclusion, in life, as in Kintsugi, the cracks are what make us beautiful. By filling them in with gold, with wisdom, resilience, and perspective, we can turn our struggles into art. So I want you to take some time this week. And reflect on a challenge or a setback that you've had recently in your life. I want you to think about how you can repair it with gold. How can it make you stronger, wiser, or even more compassionate?