Weekly Vlog!
Anthony Meindl reads from his book “You Knew when you were 2.”
Anthony references a point he makes in the book about “wabi-sabi,” a Japanease philosophy where you find the sanctity in things that are broken or old. It’s important to remember here in America because it’s a youth-driven culture, and especially in the entertainment business and Hollywood because by the time you’re 22, you’re old. We have a disconnected relationship with aging. The whole idea of “wabi-sabi” is to embrace things that we eventually want to discard. There is beauty in the ancient and in the stuff we’d normally define as broken.
There’s an extension of this in practical terms in Japan that is called “kintsugi.” Kintsugi is the art of taking something that is broken and illuminating the broken parts. You’re beautifying the brokenness by bringing out the scars and the parts that are broken. They can create a new way of understanding heart. This seems to be a theme of life itself. We have shame around the parts of ourselves that are broken when in truth they’re the very things that we need in order to make them wholly ours.
Broken doesn’t mean discarded, broken means this beautiful offering of my total self, including the broken shattered displaced pieces. As a metaphor, it’s a really beautiful reminder that we need all of you, including the parts that make you feel make you not ok. It’s about transferring our pain into purpose, making a broken heart into great art.
