Treat Yourself Like a Japanese Teacup

You’re broken. You’re beautiful

Matt and I met for lunch a couple of hours before his plea hearing. The hearing itself was routine. We would enter a guilty plea for driving under the influence of intoxicants (DUII), and he would be entered into a diversion program, meaning if he met a set of conditions over the course of two years, the charges would be dropped.

I was representing Matt as a favor because he was my brother-in-law. He was also a lawyer, a former prosecutor, who I thought was at rock bottom with his alcohol addiction.

He wasn’t even close to the bottom. Within a year, he would get another DUII, cycle through rehab three times, and later be found by his mother, dead on his bathroom floor from alcohol poisoning.

Addiction is complicated. During our lunch, I mostly just listened to Matt. I didn’t know much about addiction then, but like most people, I thought I did.

Matt told me he thought he was irreparably broken. He was losing his family, had lost his career, and now was on the other side of the law. Like all of us, Matt was in trouble because of a combination of his actions, others’ actions, and systemic forces beyond his control.

He shared some heartbreaking events. I listened without judgment and told him that I didn’t think he was broken at all, or that if he was, there was nothing beyond repair.

If I could go back to that moment now with everything I know, I would tell Matt that he was a Japanese teacup.

Japanese Teacups and Wabi Sabi

While I have never wrestled with addiction, I have had my own fall from grace. I have stood at the edge of a cliff and wondered what would happen if I could just stop feeling.

I have wondered if I was broken, no longer useful, fit for nothing other than to be thrown away and replaced.

I was saved by poetry. I started writing haiku and delving into the philosophy of this ancient Japanese poetic form that has its roots even deeper in Chinese literary history.

The best haiku in the Japanese tradition contain an element of wabi-sabi (侘寂). Wabi-sabi is a celebration of imperfection and impermanence. It’s not just a haiku thing. Wabi-sabi is a philosophy that draws from Buddhism and Shintoism.

The best way to understand the salvific power of wabi-sabi is to study a Japanese teacup.

A traditional Japanese tea ceremony is the kind of sacred cultural ritual you must experience in person to truly even start to comprehend its significance.

For me, the most remarkable part of the ceremony is the teacups. The beautiful handcrafted teacups are often cracked or chipped, and most critically, repaired with a bright gold-or silver-colored filler that draws attention to the break.

The flaw becomes what makes the teacup beautiful. No two teacups crack in the same way.

Repaired Not Replaced

We live in a cultural moment (My god, I hope it’s just a moment) where it is easier to replace than to repair. Your printer out of ink? It is likely cheaper to buy a new printer than to deal with the hassles and cost of a new ink cartridge.

A wabi-sabi Japanese teacup is a symbol that the repaired object has more beauty than the new replacement. You, me, and Matt are teacups. We are cracked and chipped. We are in need of repair, not replacement. You are not disposable.

Why do you think teacups crack? Your first answer might be simple, like someone dropped the cup. You might think a cup cracks because of carelessness.

The true answer is that a cup cracks because it is useful.

An unused teacup never faces the stress of hot tea poured over an imperfect surface. The heating and the cooling expand and compress the delicate materials over and over again, exposing imperfections from the original creation, and sometimes these stresses lead to fissures forming in the teacup.

An unsteady or inexperienced hand might set the cup down too hard, leading the edge to chip or the side to crack.

A precocious cat might knock an empty cup off the edge of the table just to watch it fall.

A perfect, unblemished cup is one that sits in the cabinet, unused. Unloved.

Teacups break because they are used and loved. The repaired teacup is the wabi-sabi beauty standard. Useful is beautiful; beautiful is useful.

The Care of Repair

We often think of artists as creators. And there is truth to that. Artists make new books, songs, dances, and paintings.

As an author, poet, and comic artist, I can tell you every piece of art you’ve ever loved was made from countless other books, songs, dances, photographs, and paintings you’ve never experienced. All art is made from art. Books come from books.

What an artist is doing when they make art is not creating something new. They are using the art they have experienced to repair something in their soul.

Humans make things to try and fill the cracks in our souls with something beautiful. We are not disposable. We are repairable.

If you ever have the chance to see a set of teacups from a Japanese tea ceremony up close, take it. Touching the line of gold that was once a crack, you can feel the tenderness emanating from the repair.

Teacups are not repaired haphazardly. The repair is done with skill, an eye for aesthetics and an understanding that the repair must extend the useful life of the teacup.

Useful is beautiful; beautiful is useful.

Our Fine China

As is (was?) the tradition, when we got married, we picked out a china pattern and put it on our wedding registry. We ended up with four sets of a beautiful china set, the pattern of which was called Presidential Blue.

The plates and bowls have a Prussian blue edge with gold details. Classy.

In the twenty-eight years we have been married, our china has only ever been out of the cabinet to be packed up when we moved. We have never once used it.

No life event was ever special enough. My most irrational self wonders if this is why our marriage ended. If we had just used the damn china on a Saturday night for a pizza dinner, or maybe for a nice home-cooked anniversary dinner, that ritual use of a beautiful thing would have kept us together.

We never used the china because we were afraid of breaking it.

How much more beautiful would a set of chipped china be — holding years of memories instead of resentments for a life that was never special enough?

Now it doesn’t matter.

Repair is Healing

You exist as a human. That is your value. You are useful to the whole of humanity because you are cracked and chipped in your own singular way. No two people crack in the same exact way.

Repairing our cracks, embracing the wabi-sabi of life, is healing. You don’t need to chase perfection. You are beautiful not in spite of your chips and cracks, but because of them. Your imperfections, both repaired and unmended, are signs of your usefulness.

Useful is beautiful; beautiful is useful.

I cannot go back to that lunch with Matt. However, he has three daughters who are now incredible adults.

Part of my repair is to make sure I let my nieces know they are teacups, that their father, however imperfect, was also a Japanese teacup. We are all beautiful as we are. None of us are disposable.

Words like mindfulness and presence are casually tossed out on social media and the gurusphere. But like when you repeat the word obey over and over again in rapid succession, the mindless repetition of mindfulness and presence has robbed them of meaning.

As I write this, I’m not sure I know what mindfulness is. I do know that there is beauty in this imperfect moment, that this flawed and transient life is beautiful and useful because of its imperfect impermanence.

Beautiful is useful; useful is beautiful.

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This post was also simultaneously published on Substack and Medium.