We Want to Travel and Party. Hold That Thought - New York Times op-ed

Several hundred years ago in Japan, artisans developed a way to mend shattered pottery known as kintsugi, in which they glued together the broken shards of ceramic with lacquer and dusted the lacquer’s exposed surface with gold or silver powder. The seams of gold or silver that held the fragments together made the vessel distinct and radiating with beauty.

Kintsugi was later embraced outside Japan as a philosophy for living: Bad things can happen that might shatter us. But we don’t have to stay broken or hide our wounds. We can put ourselves back together, and the scars we wear at the broken places become a reminder of the tragedies we’ve endured and how we overcame them — a mark of beauty in an imperfect life.

As we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, we might heed the wisdom of this philosophy. Today, many people, including me, are eager to put the past year behind them and rush into the joys of normal life that are now available — vacations, bars, parties and so on.

But if we want to emerge from this crisis whole instead of broken, we need to process what we’ve lost. Rather than bulldoze past our grief straight into the delights of summer, we should take the time to work through it.

What’s the best way to process these losses? We can, of course, seek help from a therapist or a spiritual counselor. But there is another powerful resource we can tap into: storytelling.

Most people, whether they realize it or not, carry a continuing narrative in their minds about themselves — who they are, where they came from and where they are going. We consciously and unconsciously create this story by taking the disparate fragments of our lives and assembling them into a coherent whole.

Continue reading at the NYT.