This is a piece of Kintsugi pottery.
Notice the cracks. Notice the gold that traces its fractures, highlighting what was once broken instead of attempting to hide it. In the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, broken pottery is repaired with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. The breakage is not a flaw to be disguised but a vital part of the object’s history—its identity. The cracks are not erased; they are illuminated.
Over the course of nearly forty years as a physician—and almost sixty-six years as a human being, I have spent much of my life trying to fix things: bodies, systems, relationships, lives. But I have discovered something that has changed how I understand myself and those I care for:
Wholeness is not the absence of brokenness.
It is acceptance, integration, even the display of it.
I am a son, brother, husband, father, friend, colleague, neighbor, physician, and teacher. Many pieces—some weathered, some fractured, some glimmering in unexpected ways—yet all part of the whole. Some pieces have been broken. Others remain so. But still, I am here. Whole.
A Season of Shattering
One of my own seasons of brokenness began when I was lying on my back in a small two-bedroom apartment at age fifty-two. Separated. Approaching divorce. Alone in more ways than I could fully name.
I remember staring at the ceiling, feeling the disorientation of a life I no longer recognized. It felt as if the world I had built—carefully, intentionally—had shattered into fragments I could not fit back together. This was not the story I thought I was living.
I felt like Dante at the opening of The Divine Comedy:
“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself
in a dark wood, where the true way was lost.”
It was exile. Not from a physical place, but from a sense of belonging—to others, to myself, to the life I was meant to have.
Yet in time I realized that the dark wood, too, is a teacher. It asks us to stop trying to fix long enough to listen. The broken pieces had something to say.
The Myth of the Textbook Life
In medicine, we used to joke that patients stubbornly refused to follow what the textbooks said about their illnesses. If they did, diagnoses would be so much simpler.
It turns out life behaves the same way.
There is no universal playbook for how life should go. No perfect sequence of choices that guarantees fulfillment or protection from loss. Our lives—like our bodies—evolve not despite what goes wrong, but because of it.
We humans are here, in a large part, because of mutations and imperfect repairs in our genetic code. Change—sometimes abrupt, sometimes unwelcome—shapes us into who we become.
Maybe what we call broken is actually the process of becoming.
What Healing Really Means
In medicine, we frequently, and quite understandably and appropriately, focus on repairing, restoring, and correcting. But healing is something different, something deeper.
My teacher, Jon Kabat-Zinn, describes healing as “a coming to terms with things as they are.” Not necessarily as we wish them to be. He would joke that after decades of meditation practice, he could finally be with things as they are—as long as they were the way he wanted them to be.
But healing asks something more spacious of us. We cannot return to the exact shape we held before the fall, before the diagnosis, before the loss, betrayal, or rupture. Life’s shards never reassemble into their original design.
And yet, there is a miracle in continuing to live—even in simply wanting to live. There is beauty in how we patch the cracks, how we keep going, how we continue forward.
The Light Through the Cracks
Cracks, fragments, irregularities are everywhere. Look at the face you love. It is uneven, asymmetrical, wonderfully imperfect, the way every human face is.
The wounded healer appears throughout history—from Chiron to Asclepius to Hippocrates—reminding us that healing often arises through the wound. I have seen this in my own life through divorce, the loss of two siblings, experiences of violence, financial uncertainty, and feeling at times cast out from a world I thought I belonged to.
And I have seen it in those I have cared for: people living with chronic illnesses, with diagnoses that reshape a future, with lives altered in ways that cannot be reversed.
It is often the cracks that let the light through—for both of us.
A Mosaic of Life
Today, I see my life not as a linear narrative, but as a mosaic: many pieces, many colors, many edges. Some smooth. Some sharp. Some radiant. Some still being fitted into place. The longer I look, the more I realize that the categories “broken” and “unbroken” no longer apply. Nothing was ever purely one or the other. Everything was always in motion, reforming, evolving.
Each fragment contains the essence of the whole. Each piece is a fractal of being human.
And what is true for me is true for all of us.
An Invitation
What if we viewed our lives not as a series of events needing repair, but as an unfolding work of art—a Kintsugi of being?
What if the gold that fills our cracks is not compensation for damage, but evidence of our capacity to heal, grow, and offer compassion because of what we have lived?
What would it change in how we see ourselves?
What would it change in how we treat one another?
To me, that vision feels like healing—
a coming to terms with things as they truly are,
and a recognition that we were never anything less than whole.