Kintsukuroi - A Flawless Philosophy About Imperfections

In one of the episodes of the TV series 'The Mentalist', Teresa Lisbon gifts Patrick Jane his favorite tea cup on his birthday. Not a new one but Jane's own tea cup that smashed to pieces (in an earlier episode) as the FBI was shutting down CBI's operations. Apparently, Lisbon painstakingly re-pieced every shard together to restore the cup (one of Jane's very few possessions) to its former glory. Naturally, Jane is overwhelmed. So was I. In my opinion,  the tea cup and Jane's habit of brewing tea (plus lounging on the couch) were as much a part of the storyline as the characters themselves. For me, normalcy was restored. Thanks to the tea cup.

The episode also reminded me of that beautiful Japanese term kintsukuroi. A term with which I got familiar by chance, through a very charming wordsmith I once knew. Kintsukuroi, in its simplest definition means 'to repair with gold' or 'golden repair'. But it also alludes to a broken item that upon being repaired with gold, becomes more beautiful than before. If one were to dig a little deeper in wikipedia for a more technical meaning, they would find that kintsukuroi is "the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum and is based on the philosophy that breakage and repair is treated as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise." The flaws make it more beautiful than before. Nice. A little more digging and one would find a fable associated with the term here.  I found the story Thanks to a feisty Blue Gecko's beautiful blog. 

So, coming back to 'The Mentalist', in a way Jane's repaired tea cup was a great example of kintsukuroi. It had become more beautiful (and more precious) after being repaired by someone he loved.

However, when it comes to life and all things real world, we do not find things that once broken, and mended, to be more beautiful than before. We treat them as glaring examples of gross imperfections that can never be repaired or restored to former glory. We discard such objects. And sometimes, by the same token, people as well. We are especially unforgiving when it comes to people.

Many a time, we see people point out other people's mistakes and blunders and criticize them like its nobody's business. And often times we forget that we might have committed such bloopers ourselves. We only see the scars and flaws of others as irreparable imperfections and nothing else. Perhaps, we were wired that way. To weed out imperfections in others as a part of survival of the fittest or whatever evolution meant it to be. But isn't such thought process of ours itself fundamentally flawed or broken? Don't we assume that we are far too perfect to be broken no matter how humble we are? After all, like they say, nobody's perfect.

In this regard, one must appreciate the Japanese for their appreciation of perfection (and imperfections) and the pains they take to make even the most imperfect objects, well, perfect. And they do so by highlighting such objects' imperfections! With gold!!

Perhaps it's time we changed as well. And mend ourselves. To become better than our former selves while still displaying our vulnerabilities and scars. Alas! For now there exists no kintsukuroi for us. Perfect!