Kintsugi: the golden heart of resilience

 

Kintsugi: the golden heart of resilience

di Manuela Metra.

The Goethean world view allows you to see the links, even when they, not too obvious, go unnoticed and to establish a bridge between the Western vision devoted to action and the devout Eastern contemplation. One of these is the relationship between resilience, strength, transformation and learning curve. In recent years, some words have become a symbol of something beyond their narrow meaning, taken from technical fields, and brought in everyday lexicon with added value, resilience is one of them. In engineering the impact strength is the ability of a material to withstand impact without breaking. You test, the tests, we analyze the dynamic stress shock. And ‘an important property that, in the presence of organs subjected to impact, should be increased. A material with low resilience is fragile. From here it is deduced that the resilience, in humans, by extension, both the psychological or emotional capacity, to make ready to crises of life, to the blows that the existence inflicts there, at times, under the most varied forms. Faith in the ability to resist is the whole Western, faith in action, in man’s ability to shape their own destiny. This is entirely acceptable and desirable, but there are areas where the laws change all this and resist the blows only leads to a great weariness areas where to win you have to let go. The sphere of affection, follows its own laws. There are hearts that are not used even once in his life, the hearts that have cracks due to wear, brave hearts that are broken even more than once. There are situations that really lead to a rupture, although elsewhere it is resisting. And resist is merely an act that is stopping the flow of things. In fact, sometimes, if something should break, better it breaks without using too much energy to resist. These breaks, of the heart are difficult to see and to admit and to treat. But once you understand what happened on kintsugi it offers us a first healing perspective with the elusive poetry that only Japan can donate. The kintsugi is the art of repairing the broken pottery. A ceramic route is adjusted using a dough with gold, a precious material, a symbol of link between heaven and earth. These joints will give the piece a new beauty. Of course, the object will be fragile but will have acquired a quality unique, special. A kind of awareness, having clashed with life. So you can think of to bring the concept of kintsugi on a more subtle level, and by extension to find ways to treat and fix our heart, the party which has suffered the damage. Cure is the right word. We must take care, take time out and do an action. Find a precious material such as gold and heal, adjust. With the time to devote to the healing process. This action is a transformation, a metamorphosis of pain, fracture. Turn means that, what was there before and what’s next will be different things with a living link that has metamorphosed. The creative spirit accomplishes this task of healing and brings new skills, impacting on the learning curve. It needs to find a personal way to do kintsugi, when something breaks. This personal gold to be used to pick up the pieces must have a creative component to accomplish the transformation. Taking photographs, painting, cooking, but with the knowledge of what you’re going to trasform. Kintsugi, it could be understood as the deepest part of the concept of resilience, the gilded heart. It carries within it a rigorous beauty, a pride in showing the scars of gold clad exhibited with awareness.