Kintsugi for people

Kintsugi image generated by Canva AI

Dear Reader,

To prove that life is an ever-evolving mystery that I have very little hope of understanding, a strange and wonderful thing happened last year. Poet and author Reena Kapoor, who writes Arrivals and Departures, announced via her newsletter that her play was being read by a theater group, and she invited local Substackers to attend. How fantastic, I thought with rising excitement, she lives here! I wasn't sure if I could make it to the event, but I think I left a comment on the Substack post saying I would try my best. Which led to introductory emails and the discovery that Reena lives two streets away from my house. This, of course, was a wonderful surprise, but there’s more.

We met one afternoon towards the end of November. We decided that we would get coffee and go for a walk. I remember being nervous as I walked to Reena's house. I’ve made great friends through 15 years of writing on the internet, but because of the pandemic years, I was out of practice in walking up to a relative stranger and introducing myself. It's going to be fine, I assured myself, as I knocked on Reena's door.

My internet luck held. Reena and I started talking almost immediately as we walked to Starbucks and we continued talking afterward as we circled the neighborhood. We walked for nearly two hours, going round and round, and tracing invisible circles on the roads. We exchanged our first stories and exclaimed over shared interests. We were going to be good friends, I thought, thanking the internet and friendships gods. But, over subsequent meetings, we realized that there was something else even more fascinating happening. We were both writers, but we found we were opposites in almost every other way- temperament, early life experiences, our reactions to these experiences, and subsequent life trajectories. Where one is learning to claim her voice, the other has had practice. Where one was emerging from an intense, decade-long internal journey, the other appeared to be heading that way. I can list all the ways we are different and complementary, but instead, I will share a picture: imagine entering a waiting room at a small out-of-the-way train station late in the evening in the middle of nowhere in the depths of winter. The room is warm, a fire blazing in the fireplace, and you’re glad to have found shelter. There is another traveler there, and as you draw closer to warm yourself by the fire, you get to talking with them. You learn they have arrived from the very destination you want to travel to and you realize they are actually on their way to the valley you have just arrived from. Your paths have intersected in this train station though how the two of you happened to be here at the same time is a mystery. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but you can’t shake off the eerie feeling that something else is at work, some strange magic that can be witnessed but not easily understood. You share your stories with each other, your grief, your hopes, and perhaps, most vitally, you share some medicine that will be useful for the other’s onward journey.

I am fascinated by the image of our lives as overlapping circles. Even when I think I am writing about something else, I am describing these circular journeys widening, shrinking, telescoping, and overlapping, creating a kind of beautiful, magical chaos. The Japanese term kintsugi (which I’ve read means to join with gold) is currently popular in the culture. It is the art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer or gold dust, creating an object whose brokenness contributes to its beauty. I wonder if this kind of meeting someone, holding space for them, being seen by them, and exchanging stories is how we practice kintsugi for people.

I’d love to hear what you think.

Best,

Priya

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