Imperfection enhances beauty in Japanese culture. In fact, there is a concept called wabi sabi, which refers to the three Is of aesthetics: imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. I had the good fortune to attend a kintsugi workshop as part of Staff Bonding.

These were the materials provided to each participant:

To kick things off, the trainer explained the stages of kintsugi. He imbued a lot of metaphorical meaning into his presentation. I’m sure you can extrapolate the art of kintsugi to the act of self-determination and growing more resilient in real life. About how our scars need not break us but can be assimilated into our psyche to make us better and stronger.

The trainer tried his best, but everyone was just eager to break things:

The Danes smash plates and glasses at their friends’ doors to usher in the New Year. We don’t follow such a fine tradition here, so I guess we all found this therapeutic.

A word of caution from Sensei: control your strength. The ideal method is to break the bowl into just 2-3 large pieces. I didn’t use the optimal amount of strength, so I was stranded with some small bits and pieces.

The next step was to mix equal amounts of superglue A and superglue B to create an adhesive. Then, we applied it on the edges of the broken pieces and coated them with gold paint.

However, thanks to my reckless display of strength earlier, I couldn’t fit in one small piece, try as I might.

Oh well. It was great fun, though. And I think time set aside to think about galvanising and integrating our gaps together is always a good way to spend our life energy productively!