Lest you think I’m not cool, here I am hanging out at Tumerico. According to YELP, it was the #1 pick of ‘the best restaurants in the USA’ in 2024! I always order the Frida Kahlo; a fresh tostada piled high with rice, beans, veggies and topped with a cashew cream sauce. It melts in your mouth smooth as butter; quite the opposite of Frida’s own rough, turbulent and painful life.
Throughout history, great art has often been created by those whose lives were riddled with pain. We forget that it fashions each of us as well. How often have we been forced to change careers or life paths because of a sudden setback or tragedy? Did we rise from it or merely collapse? Were we broken or merely ‘stronger in the broken places’ like Hemingway suggested?
A client recently told me that she was “broken” because she wasn’t married. So, I asked her, “Does that mean that the other 70 million, unmarried women in the US are ‘broken,’ too?” The statistic did not matter to her. Nor did the fact that she has no control over finding a willing partner. She’s accomplished professionally and has a child but that did not matter either. She thought she was broken. She was broken.
Few of us live the lives we once thought (or dreamed) we would. Isn’t it fortunate that our realities became different than what we imagined? Haven’t our sorrows ultimately made us better people? Frida couldn’t stop the bus crash which almost killed her at 18 but it offered her a whole new direction. While she began a long recuperation that never really ended, she was given a canvas and paint.
In the Japanese art of kintsugi, artisans patch up broken pottery and fill in the cracks with gold. Their philosophy is to embrace imperfection and acknowledge impermanence. So, I ask my client if she can find any ‘gold’ in her life to fill in her broken cracks. She thinks. She scowls. Then asks me as if uncertain, “My child?”
Examine a difficult time in your own life and see what good came from it. There will be something, no matter how small. Frida lined her cracks with gold just as she filled her paintings with color. How else could such a woman who was broken in every sense of the word have written this: “There is nothing more precious than laughter—it is strength to laugh, and lose oneself, to be light.” –Frida Kahlo
AGEFULLY AGING 
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