Broken Things

As I was going about the business of tidying my yard and porches the other day, I noticed I have an inordinately large collection of broken pottery. There is a big one beneath the oaks that used to house our pencil cactus. There’s one on the porch that tipped over and broke and lies where it fell. On a table is a terra cotta sun that dropped off the fence and shattered. The pieces were duly gathered and stored for a repair that never came.

Perhaps now is a good time to learn Kintsugi, which is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered precious metals. Or I could just use the masonry glue I used for the statues. That seemed to work well enough. In either case, now feels like the time for picking up broken pieces and attempting repairs. Granted, they won’t be the same, but nothing ever stays the same.

Our entire lives, in fact, are a collection of chips and dings and breakages, physical and spiritual. Our hearts get broken. A marriage fails. Loves are lost. Friends disappoint us. A job goes south. An application is denied. No matter the cause or event most of us mix up whatever spiritual epoxy works and try to glue the bits back together. It’s a piecemeal process and there’s no real instruction manual. It’s just a thing we do. Sometimes there’s help, sometimes not. In the end, what probably counts most is to just keep on trying, and understanding that while repairs won’t make the broken thing new again, we can still revel in the beauty of the attempt.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregivers Tale