Sam Radford

June 15, 2021

Beauty and brokenness go hand in hand

Avni Patel Thompson wrote a moving piece on her blog recently*, reflecting on beauty and brokenness. 

Her words are powerful and true: 

I’ve been thinking a lot about “kintsugi” over the past couple of days. It’s the Japanese art of putting together broken shards of pottery –  only instead of using a clear glue, you use a lacquer dusted with gold. More than a form of art though, it’s a philosophy – a way of viewing the world. It asks – what happens when we celebrate the piece’s history of imperfection, of brokenness, rather than try to “fix” or disguise or ignore it.

What’s more, it’s a recognition that this beauty and extraordinariness does not exist without the broken. That it is a fundamental part of the piece’s existence that must be celebrated equally as the “good stuff”. 

I wish this was how we thought about humans and particularly how we truly view mental health.

She goes on to connect this to the high profile story of Naomi Osaka pulling out of the French Open. She writes:

We are a society that lives to idolize our heroes but we can’t stand to examine what forges the steel that lies beneath. We love to marvel at how she’s the highest paid athlete but we have no stomach for her possible fallibility; a people primed for consumption without caring about the price. 

Our heroes’ stories must be wholesome and whole. Cracks are always seen as weakness never as a history to more. A history of persistence and survival and that grit we all love to talk about.

We need to change that.

I couldn’t agree more.

Beauty and brokenness are two sides of the same coin. We need to get better at acknowledging both in our own lives, but we also need to do the same when it comes to viewing the lives of others.

Most of us have a tendency to try and cover up our brokenness; fixing those cracks with invisible glue. What if we started to celebrate them and draw attention to them instead? Rather than pretending they don’t exist, we need to embrace our brokenness as part of our story, shining a light on the cracks!

It’s who we truly are. It’s who we truly all are.

–Sam

*Via Sara Campbell.

Got some thoughts on this? I’d love to hear from you – do hit reply or drop me a note.

@samradford | samradford.com

About Sam Radford

Husband, father, lover of books, writer, tech geek, sports fan, and pragmatic idealist from Sheffield, England.