It happens so quickly.
One minute, your life is going along smooth and easy and the next, you are looking around at the wreckage of what used to be your life.
In an instant, your life has radically changed and you’re left with a pile of rubble, trying to pick through what’s left and salvage the little bit you can.
Shattered.
The shattering event can be any number of things; an unfaithful spouse, sudden death of a parent, job loss, sick child or an illness.
No matter the event, your life as you used to know it is over.
Gone.
Over.
Finished.
Shattered.
In our society, being shattered is viewed as a bad thing. When you are shattered, people distance themselves as though your broken state is contagious.
Many people fail to recognize that the value that is found in shattering.
In ancient Japan, there was a process called Kintsugi. Kintsugi started out as a way of repairing broken vessels but evolved into an art. Some of the pieces fixed with Kintsugi are so breathtakingly beautiful it will take your breath away. Kintsugi masters will take a broken vessel and with painstaking care, will piece it back together and mend the broken places with a resin that they then sprinkle with powdered gold. The broken vessel becomes more beautiful and more valuable than it was in its original, unbroken state. It was such a valued process that there are people who often accused others of breaking valuable ceramics just so they could be repaired. The Japanese found a way to create beauty out of brokenness.
What if we changed our view to that of the Japanese and begin to see our own shattering as an opportunity to create something more beautiful? What if we accepted the gift that our shattering is offering us…the opportunity to be restored to something even greater than our former state.
When you look closely at a person who has been shattered and repaired, you can see the threads of wisdom, compassion, mercy and love woven through the places their pain used to reside. That, indeed, is golden.
— Lisa Vallejos
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