This Kintsugi bowl was a gift last year from a very thoughtful friend, and it currently sits on a shelf in my bedroom where I can see it every day. Are you familiar with the Japanese concept of Kintsugi? It is an art form that takes broken pottery pieces and welds them back together with gold, thus resulting in a finished product that is more beautiful, valuable, and even stronger than its original form. The perfect metaphor for my life. I have been broken, completely shattered, in many ways by Kendall’s illness and death, and all of the hard that has come afterward. However, sitting here in the aftermath (or perhaps still in the midst of it all?), I know that my life is indeed beautiful, and these experiences of mine have been valuable in helping forge me into a stronger version of myself.
I am not the same person I was, and it has been liberating lately to not only accept but choose to embrace that. Yes, it has at times been unsettling or even scary to feel like I didn’t know who I was, or how I now fit in the world. I have been on a real journey of self discovery over this last year, both in reconnecting with my “past self” but also getting to choose what things I truly value now, the person I want to be going forward. There is a certain appeal in some ways of being given a “fresh start” of sorts.
In one of the classes I attended at my Widow/Widower Conference the presenter talked about that, encouraging us all to learn who we are NOW, discover our core values and life purpose while understanding that they may shift and change throughout our life. I took a Meyers Briggs personality test tonight and discovered that my “personality” had indeed changed from what I had tested as previously. Oh, many things were the same, but there were definitely some shifts, enough that I moved to a different classification. And you know what? Reading the description of the “new me,” it really did resonate with who I now identify as, the things that are important to me, or the strengths (and yes, weaknesses) that I can now see in myself.
I really can let go of my past, my “former life,” and I can choose to do so with gratitude. Brene Brown said, “People may call what happens at midlife ‘a crisis’, but it’s not. It’s an unraveling – a time when you need a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you’re ‘supposed to live.” It doesn’t have to take a major life change or crisis to push us to make choices that help us live the lives we want to. That option is available to each of us, at any point we choose. Isn’t that amazing?
Another Japanese concept I have been trying to adopt is the wabi-sabi philosophy of life. Wabi-sabi reinforces the idea that we are MORE beautiful with the scars we acquire throughout this life, actually are BECAUSE of those scars. We were never meant to make it through life unscathed, untested, unchanged. We can be at peace as we embrace our own imperfection and the uncertainty of this messy, wonderful, remarkable life.