Broken things are the strongest

On trying -- and failing.

(A Kinstugi bowl)

It’s tryout season — soccer and basketball — in the Cillizza household.

And it is HUGELY stressful for me.

You go to those fields or courts and stand with all the other parents watching their kids with microscopic attention. Hoping the coaches like your kid. That something of their innate goodness (athletically —but also as a person) shines through. That they want your kid.

(Sidebar: Rather than stare at my kids for the entire 2 hour tryout, I have taken to walking around the school/field/whatever to distract myself. Podcasts are a godsend!)

For us, it’s sports. For you it might be theater. Or robotics. Or, hell, college admissions.

But, my guess is that you know what I am talking about. Wanting so badly for your child to get something he or she wants so, so badly. To make it. To be recognized as worthy.

I feel this particularly strongly. Because my natural tendency — as my amazing and remarkably well-adjusted wife likes to remind me — is to be a snow plow parent.

You know the type — clearing the way of any possible obstacles for the kids so that their paths are totally easy. Ensuring that they are never sad, never disappointed, never don’t get exactly what they want in life.

I know this is, well, impractical. No life can be without disappointment or defeat or sadness.

In fact, a life without any hurdles isn’t a life at all. It means, almost certainly, that you never put yourself out there, never reached for something that might be beyond your grasp, never took a chance.

I’ve been thinking a ton about this lately. (Lots of sideline pacing over the last few days!)

And I keep coming back to a quote from Louise Penny’s “Inspector Gamache” series of books. I’ve written about the books before in this space. They are, ostensibly, mysteries. But there are profound insights about human nature in them.

Including this one, which comes from the lead character, Armand Garmache, the head of police for Quebec:

“Things are strongest when they are broken. We are all marred and scarred and imperfect.”

I love that. I loved it when I first read it — it’s in Penny’s “A Great Reckoning” — and I love it even more now.

While Penny doesn’t make the direct comparison, that line from her fictional detective made me think of kintsugi — the Japanese art of repairing broken cups and bowls and the like.

I really liked this description of kintsugi:

[The] Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

The idea is that purposely showing the cracks — and creating something beautiful from them — makes the original piece (a bowl, a cup, whatever) that much more special.

This, from Christy Bartlett, an expert on kintsugi, is terrific on that front:

Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated… a kind of physical expression of the spirit of mushin….Mushin is often literally translated as “no mind,” but carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions. …The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject.

(Sidebar: Death Cab for Cutie — great band! — made an album called “Kintsugi” in 2015. Well worth the listen.)

We are all then the product of not just our successes but our failures too. And rather than try to hide those failures — or avoid them by never even trying — we need to embrace them as a fundamental part of ourselves.

I’ve learned this lesson myself over the past 16 months. Being laid off at CNN broke me. I spent months wondering if I could pick up the pieces. Or if I even wanted to.

What I’ve realized since then, though, is that I am stronger and better for having gone through that. I know now I can find other avenues to do what I love — write and talk about politics. I know now I am not alone in struggling with what my career — and my life — should be. I know I can handle whatever life throws at me because I have been broken before — and was able to put myself back together even stronger.

It’s that kind of thinking I am working to bring to tryout season for my boys.

They may make these teams. And, if they do, we will celebrate those successes.

But, if they don’t, I will try to emphasize that the victory (in life) is not getting everything we want. It’s being willing to go after what we want — knowing that there is no certainty that we will get it.

Real failure isn’t not getting chosen for the team. It’s never trying out for the team because you are too scared you might not make it.

I will tell them that our rejections — mine included — happen not to us but for us. (A wise woman told me that recently.) Disappointments will happen — we can’t control that. All we can control is how we respond to those disappointments.

I learned this lesson later in life. But I will work to make sure my boys learn it much younger. I think it’s one of the most important things I can teach them.