Breaks in the everyday
each crack echoes
with gold still vivid.
The business world loves clean victories. Clear balance sheets. Resumés without gaps. Pitches without tremor. It loves polished photos, biographies without scribbles, trajectories as smooth as a growth curve in an Excel sheet. But the truth is, most successes rest on a balance of scars. It’s not very photogenic, but it’s what marks the soul — like the ritual scarifications worn by certain cultures, both aesthetic and symbolic of passage.
I don’t know any sincere entrepreneur who hasn’t been cracked. By a stillborn project. By a strategic error. By an investor pulling out at the last moment, a client who never paid, a partner who betrayed or simply disappeared. The real ones know. They know that what we sometimes call “resilience” is just a polite word for “I gathered my pieces on my knees.” They know that courage is not about succeeding quickly, it’s about repairing slowly.
In the land of the rising sun, there is an art called kintsugi. My muse whispers it to me today. It is not about hiding the cracks in a bowl or a plate. It is about highlighting them. Honoring them. With gold. The mended object does not return to its original shape. It becomes something else. Something deeper. More alive. A visible memory of what it has endured. And if I needed an image of what I am trying to live, to do, to embody — it might be that one. Not to return to the state before. But to make the “after” a habitable place. Golden.
A week ago, I wrote a piece about discretion as a posture, as a fertile interval (ma). An article that didn’t say everything, but hinted at an echo to come — a future journey to Japan, quietly evoked. Not as an event. As a premonition. Today I feel this trip is not a parenthesis. It is the continuation. As if each article in this series were a fissure waiting to be repaired. And that one day, reading it all again, we might see a golden line emerge, linking the texts, the silences, the absences — and perhaps, through them, myself. Perhaps, through them, ourselves.
I write to numb the effluvia of my daytime thoughts. To ease my torments as a man, as an entrepreneur — or both, I no longer know. I invoke a muse, not to seduce, but to find the strength to piece the words back together. Those words my friend Rodrigo called banal, worthless, sometimes even treacherous. He who invites me to distinguish the ones that merely communicate from those that create.
My muse for this piece is neither conquered nor conquering. She is a source. A thread. A soft and constant tension. She has not repaired me. She has promised me nothing. She watches in silence, and something in me begins to seek order. Sometimes, I raise my eyes to her. Like tonight. I study the calm glow of her gaze in contrast with her glowing eyes, and I retain an image: the line and gentle relief of her neck. Not a detail, but a curve. A soft posture in the continuity of the real — between head and heart. Something like a golden nerve. Fine. Decisive. She is not the kintsugi. She is what invites me to practice it.
Prayer, too, is a kintsugi. Each prostration is a fracture of the body, a repeated submission to the invisible. We bow. We rise. We begin again. Several times a day. Every day. And in this gesture, we offer up our fractures. We direct them, almost instinctively, toward the East. Toward the rising. Toward the horizon where light begins again. It is not blasphemy. It is a secret smile from destiny. Perhaps even our prayers have always known where the repair should begin.
I do not know exactly what I will be looking for in Japan. But I am beginning to understand what I need to lay down there. Fragments. Memories. Undigested pain. Splintered ambitions. Glances we failed to hold. Goodbyes never spoken. And perhaps a golden thread, still invisible, with which all of this may one day stand tall.
This is what I take with me for now. This text is not a conclusion. It is a fragment. A fragment of myself, mended at the edge of a morning, somewhere between two horizons, between two prayers. And if there is still a fissure in you, perhaps a bit of gold is already trying to cross it.
