Kintsugi” is a centuries-old Japanese art of fixing broken or cracked pottery. Rather than throwing out broken pottery or trying to hide the cracks, the technique involves rejoining the broken pieces with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. When put back together, the whole piece of pottery looks even more beautiful, clear displaying its broken history rebuilt.
I hear from clients about the difficulty of getting back to life and functioning normally (myself included). We are a nation in trauma and although the ground battle has just started it will take time to complete. The trauma we are in is comparable to the waves at sea. Sometimes we are in a storm engulfed by waves and will just come up to breathe. But some of the time the waves will calm down and here is the place where we can try and take control and strengthen our resilience by returning to routine and managing continuity.
I would like to share two concepts from Logotherapy, founded by Victor Frankel, which may help in our day to day coping. Frankel coined the term “tragic optimism” as a unique human experience to hope and find meaning in life through the existence of loss, pain and suffering.
Therefore according to Frankel we can:
1 Choose our responses no matter our circumstances. Everything can be taken from a person but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. – We can choose to pick ourselves up, “unfreeze’ ourselves from the trauma and choose Life and Goodness in face of Evil.
2 Discover an individualized experience of meaning under any and every circumstance. Define what is meaningful at any moment, what gives each individual a sense of purpose and value. This can vary from small defined tasks such feeding our families, accomplishing tasks in our jobs and providing for our families, or volunteering and contributing to national effort. . According to Frankel in order to find meaning we need to experience coherence, direction/motivation, and a feeling of mattering (belonging).
In addition we should relate not just to the present but also to future- since this will restore our hope and optimism. For example, if we have some future goals or dreams now may be a good time to explore them. One client told me she is using this time to expand her knowledge and gained the rights to translate a professional book into Hebrew, Whatever it is, we need to define what is important to us and gives us meaning and then set attainable goals within a reasonable time limit to accomplish them.
These concepts will allow us to take back some control over our lives in these uncertain frightening times. This is part of gluing together the cracks, making sense of our existence on a daily basis, until we will achieve the full kintsugi – create an existence more beautiful and meaningful than it was before.