Show Your Scars

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery.

Essentially, you take a perfectly fine piece of porcelain and break it into dozens of pieces. Once you’ve collected the shards, begin tediously putting them back together with a mixture of metal that highlights the repair work itself. The more beautiful and obvious the repairs, the more expensive the work.

Unlike most repair jobs, Kintsugi makes no attempt to hide the brokenness. Quite the opposite; it puts them on display.

Imagine if we considered our bodies this way. If our scars were something to show off instead of something to hide. If we were proud of our broken bits. If Captain Hook said “screw it” and left the patch at home.

When asked what he was going to do with the tattoo of his ex-wife’s initials, Dave Navarro, lead guitar for Jane’s Addiction said,

“I feel like at some point your body becomes like a walking diary and you’ve got to live with it. I still had that experience. It’s a part of my story and my life, so I celebrate that. I feel that to cover up something would be to deny having gone through it.”

Time’s too short to let stretch marks, bad tattoos, that little layer of fat around your belly, or a few scars slow you down. You run your life. Not your past. Now get out there and act like it.