We Are All Broken. That’s How the Light Gets In... Reflections by Ray [#17]

Ernest Hemingway? Leonard Cohen? Ralph Waldo Emerson? Benjamin Blood? Rumi? Lord Jesus – I am the Light?

Whoever… I just heard that quote repeated by Ellen DeGeneres the other day and made me reflect… as almost exactly a couple of years ago I had written an article based on the Kübler-Ross model about how those experiencing grief go through a series of five emotions: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance, and circle back and forth between the first four before finally moving to Acceptance.

The article was born out of a loss I was also trying to close out in my mind but I had no idea how it would affect others... Young IT colleague and now book author! Kirtish read it and told me he didn’t know if he should like it … no words he said … worse yet a close colleague of mine who had just lost her beloved teenage son in a tragic accident told me she just couldn’t read it. So, I took it down in a hurry, deleted it off my PC, and thought I would never write on the topic again.

Two years on and a COVIDed world too, with indescribable hardships for everyone especially in my home country where so many struggled to get a hospital bed, avail of oxygen, faced sudden deaths of old and young alike and the valiant unified fight that everyone put up just to survive… I think I am able to put this article out now also as my dear friend just went on holiday to Armenia with her hubby and had a relatively good time.

Seeing her smiling courageous face in the pictures and hearing that quote again last night drove me to write this article… as I seem to still be hovering about in Stage 4 having lost my mom as well too in this period and I hope it is therapeutic for me and someone out there too.

We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in…

When things happen to us either through our own choice or by fate, it shatters us, it’s like your insides are destroyed, your mind goes berserk or blank and your eyes just don’t seem to dry up. You react at small incidents, insensitive remarks or worse yet shut down caring appeals from friends. Take it from me, allow yourself to feel that brokenness… shutting it down just makes it worse and you react in all sorts of ways damaging yourself and others…

Know that you are not alone… I know we all selfishly think of ourselves first but know that there are many like us in that situation. I think COVID reminded everyone of how things could change in an instant.

I had always thought a tomboy girl in our group was the strongest of all of us and she proved it to me when she told me the other day that she had had to go through the death of not one but two of her newly born babies within weeks of their birth. How do you even go on in life after that... but she has... and now has two amazing, super-clever boys who are now in University.

I am the best at resisting insights born of brokenness. One of the ways I most oppress myself is by assuming that I, alone, am shattered while everyone else is whole and I guess most of us are guilty of that.

There are entire industries in this era dedicated to the self-hating proposition that we should feel fat, old, and ugly, that we should straighten something, or snip something, or be lighter, or darker, and then, then we'll finally have dignity; then we'll be whole.

The Japanese have this art called Kintsukuroi (金繕い, “golden repair”), also called Kintsugi (金継ぎ, “golden joinery”), which is the art of repairing broken pottery with gold.

The story is told of a beautiful teabowl that was the favorite of a military ruler named Toyotomi Hideyoshi. During a celebration one day at his home, the bowl was accidentally dropped by a page, breaking the bowl into five pieces. No one breathed as they all waited for Hideyoshi, who was known for having fiery temper, to fly into a rage, fearing for the page’s life. As they waited with bated breath, a quick witted guest, Hosokawa Yusai, spouted off an amusing poem in a play on words from a famous verse about the accident which caused everyone, including Hideyoshi, to laugh. That verse became the origin of the bowl’s name: Tsutsui Zutsu. “Furthermore, the bowl stood as talismanic proof that imagination and language had the power to make ill fortune good”

Nevertheless, Hideyoshi wanted his favorite bowl and posed a challenge to find a way to mend the 5 broken pieces beautifully. After multiple artisans tried and failed to restore the bowl to use and beauty, one discovered a method of gluing the pieces with lacquer and brushing the paste with powdered gold while it was still sticky giving the bowl the appearance of having been glued together with ribbons of gold.

Having been mended with gold, the break, rather than diminishing the bowl’s beauty, added beauty and value to the bowl.

Allowing the light to come through is similar and I feel even more profound as you are not just fixing the gaps but enabling yourself to be renewed out-in and in-out.

This life is not for the perfect. It is not for the flawless. It is not for the whole. If you are like me, there are parts of you that are very good, and there are parts of you that are not so good. There are parts of you that strive and fall short; there are parts of you that feel broken. Those are the parts that let in the light. Don't run from your imperfections. Don't hide from your brokenness. Broken bones re-grow stronger at the very location where they are broken. Those are the cracks where the light will shine through.

Until next time,

Ray.