Toys, toys, toys everywhere! Many children have several toys and repairing a broken toy is not easy. How do you glue little bits of plastic together? It is impossible! So we buy a new toy and throw the old toy away.
The word kintsukuroi refers to the Japanese art of repaired pottery. Broken pottery gets a new life with the help of lacquer resin sprinkled with gold dust. But the essence of kintsukuroi is so much more. Kintsukuroi shows us that things are fragile and it is the resilience that makes them beautiful. It is the same with humans when we stop pretending to be strong and learn to love our weaknesses, our inner core becomes strong.
It might be worth the effort to repair a handmade bowl but there is no point with repairing other things. Or is there? Well, the idea to repair something with something precious makes us value the thing more. This idea is the opposite of what we often believe at least in Western culture.
The essence of kintsukuroi can be the starting point for talking about how we value ourselves and things in our home.
- What is good about being perfect?
- What is negative with always having to be perfect?
- What is interesting about perfect toys?
- Can we love a broken thing?
Many broken toys can be dangerous to play with, yet sometimes it may be possible to mend them with something precious and put them on a shelf so that our children can admire its resilience. The search for ways to mend things moves thinking forward to a new place from where new possible solutions that you had no idea of when you started looking may be found. And yes, soon it might be possible to mend plastic with precious metals. Go here to read about ways to solve the problem with mixing two substances with different melting points.
