On New Year’s Eve last year, I published a post on BOYGs and making SMART goals stick. This year, given all that we have collectively endured, I am instead opting for YELOs: Year-End Learnings and Observations. My hope is that we might collectively put to use the knowledge we’ve gained from the sudden recalibration of the reality of our daily lives as a sort of Kintsugi for the soul.
For those who don’t know or who have forgotten the term, Kintsugi is a Japanese art that dates back centuries in which broken pieces of pottery are repaired with a lacquer dusted with powdered gold, silver or platinum. Rather than obscuring the damage to the original piece, Kintsugi “celebrates each artifact's unique history by emphasizing its fractures and breaks,” according to My Modern Met.
What could be more apt to heal the parts of our broken bits from this past year than “[a]n art form born from mottainai — the feeling of regret when something is wasted — and ‘mushin,’” or a mind in flow and open to everything? What’s more, My Modern Met observes that “Kintsugi often makes the repaired piece even more beautiful than the original, revitalizing it with a new look and giving it a second life.”
It’s that beauty of a second life with the wounds scabbed over in glimmering gold that excites me about the possibilities for 2021 and beyond as we reemerge into the world from our pandemic wilderness. As I reflect on my BOYGs for 2020, I’m amazed at how I realized those goals despite my mindset being limited by my pre-pandemic understanding of how I would achieve my goals. The Pompei-esque disruption of our daily lives—I never did make it back to my former office to clear it out after being told in March that we would begin to work from home—and our subsequent reliance on the Internet for everything from school to socializing give me hope for our collective resilience.
Before we Kintsugi the hell out of 2020, however, it’s important to look at the cracks and chasms that the pandemic has widened for examination. We have to properly clean and dress our wounds, lest infectious debris render us with gangrene instead of Kintsugi. As our radiant scabs emerge from the arduous experiences we endured in 2020, we can then grow and draw strength from our sparkling scars well after the pandemic fades from our collective consciousness.
Here’s to honoring our scars as we grow into our new, shimmering skins.