Kintsugi （which translates to “golden joinery”） considers the breaks and the subsequent repairs part of the vessel’s history, fundamental elements of its being. The bowls aren’t beautiful despite the imperfections. They’re beautiful because of the imperfections. The cracks make them better.
What’s true for ceramics can also be true for people.
Just ask Mara Abbott. If you can’t quite place the name, I’ll refresh your memory. In the 2016 Olympic road race I described in the previous chapter, she’s the American rider who lost the lead in the final moments and finished in fourth place.
“The days that followed the race were some of the largest experiences of heartbreak that I’ve ever felt,” she told me via Zoom one February afternoon from Buffalo, Wyoming, where she now works as a newspaper reporter. The word she chooses to capture the experience: “shattering.”
Yet she reassembled the pieces and found new insights in the fissures. The Rio contest was the last race of a successful ten-year cycling career. The experience didn’t improve her times or earn her another trophy. But “it somehow gave me this touchstone and perspective that makes other decisions and value judgments easier for me,” she said. Most of all, she yearns to recapture the experience of being as fully engaged and alive as she was on that August afternoon. “The opportunity and the feeling that I got out of that loss, and that fullness and that wholeness, is the greatest privilege I could have ever asked for.” Because of the pain, she sees the rest of her life with greater urgency and purpose. “If you have a broken heart, it means you have done something big enough and important enough and valuable enough to have broken your heart.”
As Mara Abbott suggests, the cracks are how the light gets in. And as we’ll see in the next section, peering through those cracks offers a glimpse of the good life.
Part Two
REGRET REVEALED
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“Me arrepiento no haber cambiado mis hábitos alimenticios desde joven, fume y he consumido mucho alcohol. También consumía carne los tres tiempos de comida casi mi vida entera. Hace seis meses cambie a un estilo de vida vegano y me he sentido mejor que nunca antes en mi vida, solo me pongo a pensar si hubiera hecho esto desde joven.”[*]
Male, 46, Honduras
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“I spent too much time trying to meet others’ idea of normal. Accept yourself, love your neighbor, and make each day a special memory.”
Nonbinary, 62, Utah
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“My biggest regret is not using my time as a stay-at-home mom to really teach my children about their relationship with God and Jesus Christ. I could have used my time with them better to help them develop and strengthen their faith, which in turn would have given them the best foundation to succeed in life.”
Female, 54, Minnesota
5.
Regret on the Surface
“my body is NOT a temple it’s a STORAGE UNIT for my REGRETS.”
@ElyKreimendahl, Twitter, 2020
What do people regret?
That’s a question that pollsters and professors have been asking since the middle of the twentieth century. In 1949, for instance, George Gallup, founder of the American Institute of Public Opinion, surveyed U.S. citizens about what they considered to be the biggest mistake of their lives. The number one answer was a resounding “Don’t know.”
Four years later, Gallup returned with what is likely the first polling question directly about regret. “Generally speaking,” his team asked in 1953, “if you could live your life over again, would you live it in much the same way as you have, or would you live it differently?” A majority of Americans, as you see from the headline on the following page, said they wouldn’t change a thing.
This discomfort with admitting and enumerating hardship makes sense. Think about life in 1953. World War II lingered in the public memory. The United Kingdom, with a newly crowned twenty-seven-year-old queen, was still rationing food. Japan and much of Europe were digging out of devastation. It was the year Joseph Stalin died, the Korean War ended, and the first polio vaccine was developed. With the exterior world so fraught, interior contemplation might have felt indulgent. Navel-gazing was still a few years from becoming a national pastime.
Yet peeking through the unease was a theme that researchers would slowly come to endorse. In the 1949 poll, the runner-up to “Don’t know” for biggest mistake was “Didn’t get enough education.” In the 1953 poll, among those who had regrets, the top choice, selected by 15 percent of the sample, was “Get more education.” That, too, makes sense. In 1953, just 6 percent of the U.S. population had attended four or more years of college. More than half of Americans had not completed high school.[1] Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court case that declared segregated public schools a violation of the Constitution, was still a year away. More Americans were beginning to imagine the possibilities of education in the future, which perhaps meant that more regretted not having or pursuing those possibilities in the past. By 1965, when Gallup conducted a poll for Look magazine about what Americans would do differently if they had a chance to relive their lives, 43 percent chose “Get more education,” nearly three times what respondents said eight years earlier.[2]