Who's your favourite sportsman? Mine is Eldrick Tont "Tiger" Woods. Now I've never played a full 18 holes of golf. I played nine once, and it was a mysterious and highly unpredictable game (even just in terms of knowing which direction the ball might head after being struck). I tend to agree with Harry Leon Wilson who wrote in his 1905 novel The Boss of Little Arcady "this new game of golf that the summer folks play seems to have too much walking for a good game and just enough game to spoil a good walk".
Following an outstanding amateur golf career, Tiger turned professional at age 20 in late summer 1996. By April 1997 he had already won his first major, and reached the number one position in the world rankings only two short months later. Through the 2000s, Tiger was the dominant force in golf, spending over 500 almost unassailable weeks from August 1999 to October 2010 as World Number One. Good natured, clean living and simply apple-pie. Perfection in plaid pants. I don't like him that much for his golf, impressive as it was. I like him for something far more impressive: his humanness.
Tiger's monumental fall from grace after the airing of his almost innumerable alleged infidelities was for me the defining moment of his career. The sponsors dropped away like wounded birds and suddenly he was no longer outstanding in the field but just out standing in the field. No mere sportsman now, no freak with a big stick and an uncanny ability to hole his dimpled balls, this was a human through and through: flawed, and apparently subject to all the same vagaries and temptations as are we all. Suddenly he was real. It was his brokenness, his flaws that made him so appealing, accessible, real. Before, he had seemed, well, too shiny, too good, fake.
You could probably say the same about President Clinton, after he "did not have sexual relations with that woman". Slick Willie, was always my preferred moniker for him, so to speak, although the Comeback Kid has a certain je n'est sais quoi in the circumstances. Like Tiger, who rose to number one again in 2013, Clinton's polls actually firmed up after his fall from grace. Why is that? How? Weren't they both broken?
Wabi-sabi represents a Japanese aesthetic view centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. According to author Richard Powell, the Japanese term wabi-sabi "nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect." Buddhist author Taro Gold describes wabi-sabi as "the wisdom and beauty of imperfection." Westerners may be most familiar with its application in kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold or silver. Also known as kintsukuroi, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, understanding it is something to be celebrated rather than disguised. Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, the repair itself is literally illuminated. It is deeply beautiful (though Greek newlyweds may have a different view, if only for practical reasons).
Following an outstanding amateur golf career, Tiger turned professional at age 20 in late summer 1996. By April 1997 he had already won his first major, and reached the number one position in the world rankings only two short months later. Through the 2000s, Tiger was the dominant force in golf, spending over 500 almost unassailable weeks from August 1999 to October 2010 as World Number One. Good natured, clean living and simply apple-pie. Perfection in plaid pants. I don't like him that much for his golf, impressive as it was. I like him for something far more impressive: his humanness.
Tiger's monumental fall from grace after the airing of his almost innumerable alleged infidelities was for me the defining moment of his career. The sponsors dropped away like wounded birds and suddenly he was no longer outstanding in the field but just out standing in the field. No mere sportsman now, no freak with a big stick and an uncanny ability to hole his dimpled balls, this was a human through and through: flawed, and apparently subject to all the same vagaries and temptations as are we all. Suddenly he was real. It was his brokenness, his flaws that made him so appealing, accessible, real. Before, he had seemed, well, too shiny, too good, fake.
You could probably say the same about President Clinton, after he "did not have sexual relations with that woman". Slick Willie, was always my preferred moniker for him, so to speak, although the Comeback Kid has a certain je n'est sais quoi in the circumstances. Like Tiger, who rose to number one again in 2013, Clinton's polls actually firmed up after his fall from grace. Why is that? How? Weren't they both broken?
Wabi-sabi represents a Japanese aesthetic view centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. According to author Richard Powell, the Japanese term wabi-sabi "nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect." Buddhist author Taro Gold describes wabi-sabi as "the wisdom and beauty of imperfection." Westerners may be most familiar with its application in kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold or silver. Also known as kintsukuroi, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, understanding it is something to be celebrated rather than disguised. Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, the repair itself is literally illuminated. It is deeply beautiful (though Greek newlyweds may have a different view, if only for practical reasons).
Perhaps wabi-sabi is a concept for our times, as we roll our role models and elect leaden leaders. The first item ever sold on eBay, now a multi-billion-dollar e-commerce business, was a broken laser pointer. Even though the seller informed the buyer the item didn't work, it nevertheless sold for $14.83. I wonder if the buyer had it repaired in gold laquer.
Can kintsugi be practised in the realm of human relationships? I dare say Tiger and the Comeback Kid applied liberal amounts of gold and precious metals to theirs as the ground fell away from them (though I imagine these were lacking in laquer). Can you repair a broken heart with laquer and gold dust?
In Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler delivers the following speech to Scarlett O'Hara: "I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived." Lately though I've certainly found myself embracing a certain serene melancholy and gentle acceptance of brokenness. My own, that of lovers past and of those closest to me. I sometimes picture those fault lines as the richest seams in our interactions. Sometimes the right state of things is broken. At their best. Authentic. Real. Human.
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