The Erosion of a Quiet Certainty Part 4 by Goh Ling Yong
The Erosion of a Quiet Certainty Part 4
by Goh Ling Yong
Finding My Footing on Shifting Ground
There’s a bowl on my desk that I can no longer use for soup. Its pale celadon glaze is fractured by a web of brilliant gold lines, a shining testament to its own undoing. From a distance, it looks like a delicate piece of art, a ceramic vessel struck by lightning and filled with light. Up close, you can feel the subtle ridges of the lacquer, the places where the pieces didn't meet with perfect smoothness. It’s a map of its own breaking, and in many ways, a map of mine.
For most of my life, I lived with a quiet certainty. It wasn't loud or declarative; it was a foundational belief, as silent and solid as the bedrock beneath a house. It was the unwavering conviction that I knew who I was. I was a person of diligence, of predictable emotions, of straight lines. My life was a carefully constructed narrative with a clear beginning, a logical middle, and an anticipated end. I believed in the structural integrity of my own character. Breakable things happened to other people.
The erosion didn't start with a tremor. It began as a slow, almost imperceptible wearing away. A fine powder of doubt dusting the surfaces I had once kept so clean. It was the hollow note in a friend's laughter when I shared a dream. It was the promotion that went to someone else, a decision so baffling it felt like a clerical error in the universe’s filing system. It was the realization that the passions that once burned like a furnace had cooled to embers, their warmth barely enough to keep the chill at bay.
Each was a small thing, a hairline crack I could ignore. I’d run my thumb over it, tell myself it was just a cosmetic flaw, and place the vessel of myself back on the shelf, facing the unblemished side to the world.
The day the bowl broke was unremarkable. It was a Tuesday in April, the air thick with the promise of a storm that wouldn't break. I was washing it, my hands slick with soap, my mind a thousand miles away, churning over a conversation from the day before. A careless turn, a slip of the fingers. It didn’t shatter into a thousand pieces. It fell into the sink with a dull, definitive thud and cleaved into three large, elegant fragments.
The silence that followed was profound. I stood there, water running over my hands, staring at the pieces. The break was so clean, so absolute. In that moment, the bowl wasn't just a bowl. It was my carefully curated identity, lying in the basin in ruins. The smooth, uninterrupted promise of its form was gone, and I felt a grief so sharp it stole my breath.
My first instinct was to sweep the pieces into the bin. This is what we do with broken things, isn't it? We discard them. To keep them is to admit defeat, to live with a monument to our own failure. I remember thinking how the old Goh Ling Yong would have thrown the pieces away without a second thought, already searching online for a replacement, something identical, something that could pretend the break had never happened.
But I couldn't do it. I dried the pieces carefully, their sharp edges feeling dangerous and intimate. I wrapped them in a soft cloth and placed them in a drawer, a secret sorrow I wasn't ready to part with.
They stayed there for months. Sometimes, in the dead of night, I would take them out and try to fit them together, like a child with a puzzle. But they would only hold for a moment before collapsing again, a reminder of their inherent brokenness. The quiet certainty I had lived with was gone, replaced by the grating sound of shard on shard. The bedrock had crumbled, and I was learning the terrifying reality of life on shifting sand.
It was a small article online, stumbled upon by chance, that introduced me to kintsugi—the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. The philosophy behind it struck me with the force of a revelation: the breakage and repair are not something to hide. They are part of the object's history, an event that adds to its beauty and uniqueness.
I didn't become a master craftsman overnight. My first attempts were clumsy, the lacquer thick and uneven. Gold powder ended up everywhere but in the seams. It was a slow, painstaking process that demanded a patience I didn't think I possessed. I had to hold the pieces together for long stretches, my muscles aching, waiting for the resin to set. I had to learn to sand and polish with a delicate touch, to follow the path of the break rather than fighting against it.
In those quiet hours, working under the warm glow of a desk lamp, the world outside fell away. It was just me and the broken pieces. And slowly, a new kind of certainty began to form, not of solid rock, but of something more fluid, more akin to the golden lacquer I was carefully applying.
I realized that my belief in an unchanging self was the most fragile thing of all. It was a beautiful, smooth vessel, yes, but it was hollow. It had no room for growth, no tolerance for the inevitable impacts of life. My desperate attempts to keep it pristine, to hide the hairline cracks, had made the eventual break all the more devastating.
The true art wasn't in preventing the breaking, but in the tending to the pieces afterward. It was in the gentle, deliberate act of mending. Each line of gold I traced was an acceptance. Here is where a disappointment cut deep. Here is where a loss carved out a piece of me. Here is where my own carelessness led to a fall. Instead of being marks of shame, they became veins of resilience. They were the evidence that I had not been discarded. I had been pieced back together.
The climax wasn't a grand epiphany, but a quiet moment of completion. After weeks of work, I held the finished bowl in my hands. It was heavier now, more substantial. The gold lines caught the light, creating a new and intricate pattern that was, in its own way, far more beautiful than the original, unbroken form. It was whole again, but it was not the same. It would never be the same. And for the first time, I understood that was the entire point.
Now, the bowl sits on my desk. It holds my pens and stray paperclips, a functional piece of my daily life. It is not an idol on a pedestal. It is a companion. It reminds me that belief is not a static state of being, but a dynamic process of losing and finding, breaking and mending. It is not a fortress to be defended, but a garden to be cultivated, with seasons of loss and seasons of regrowth.
Finding my footing on shifting ground has meant letting go of the need for the ground to be solid. It means learning the dance of instability, of embracing the wobble, of trusting that even when things fall apart, there is a way to gather the pieces. We can choose to see the fractures not as the end of the story, but as the places where the light gets in. The places where the gold can finally be seen.
The gold, I’ve learned, only sticks to what is broken.
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