COLUMN: Don’t Mind the Mess – Be proud of your gold

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Most of the time, human beings are pretty tough creatures.

We endure so many things throughout our lives: rejection, pain, loss, disappointment… life spares no one.

Such hardy creatures we are, rebuilding ourselves, again and again, with every disaster, crisis, tragedy, or goodbye. We smile through our tears. We laugh through our heartache. We fall apart. We gather up our pieces.

And we go on.

Books and poetry, paintings and songs – so many are based on struggle and overcoming tough times. In fact, the entire genre of country music wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for the devastating experience of heartbreak.

Most of us have been broken a time or two in our lives, and we have the scars to prove it.

Most of the time, we healed, in spite of ourselves. Sometimes, the experience made us braver. Sometimes it made us more cautious.

But almost always, it left us with a wisdom we didn’t have before we were broken.

To be honest, we are the unsung heroes of our own stories. We are the survivors of our own mistakes, the mistakes of others, or just plain crazy fate.

But we go on.

I recently read a quote that said, “In Japan, broken objects are often repaired with gold. The flaw is seen as a unique piece of the object’s history, which adds to its beauty. Consider this when you feel broken.”

This struck a chord with me. I pictured this beautiful, ornate piece of pottery, with veins of gold running all over it.

If this broken object represents a full life, met with personal risks and challenges and the occasional failures that inevitably follow, the gold would dominate all the other colours on that object, and the parts made of gold would be stronger than the clay it was originally made of.

It sounds so beautiful and inspiring on a philosophical level.

But we live in a world that isn’t drawn to broken vessels. Most of us want to paint over those veins of gold, in spite of the courage they represent.

Some of us do a bang up job with that brush, but we forget that our cracks still give us away.

We don’t want people to see that life had its way with us, and we didn’t always win. Some of us heal funny. We never return to who we were before, because some of our pieces no longer fit.

We seldom get a say in how we are broken, and we don’t always get a say in how we heal.

So we don’t always come out of battle looking powerful and prepared like Hercules. Many times, we look more like the Velveteen Rabbit, tattered and torn, with some of our pieces missing.

So what’s my point of this depressing rant, you ask?

Simply this: Be proud of your journey.

Be proud of your scars and your cracks. If you woke up this morning, and still have any juice at all left in that broken vessel, have a toast and celebrate it!

Life is more about outlook than outcome. Maybe things didn’t turn out the way you planned. Maybe they’re actually so terrible you didn’t even want to get out of bed today.

But you did.

And maybe right now, even that deserves a round of applause.

Unless you live in a cave, you won’t leave this life without a few cracks. And as Leonard Cohen once wrote, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

To be broken doesn’t make you a failure. It simply means you had the courage to live.

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