Fractured

Sometimes something catches your attention before you know why.

On Sunday, in the middle of everything going on, I walked over to the Devon Arts Week exhibition. I needed time away from the boxes and the decisions and that feeling that dozens of things needed doing at once. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular.

Then I found a triptych, part of Fractured, by Jan Shayler, whose work you can see on her Facebook page. I stood and looked at it for a while. Before I read the note beside it, the paintings had already said something to me. The way the three pieces sat together, the fracture and what stayed behind, moved me more than I expected.

Jan was there, and we talked for a bit. I told her the work had brought me to tears, and she was warm and expanded on her inspiration. It’s a rare thing to thank an artist in person for what their work does to you.

Then I read the note, and it changed the picture again. Jan drew on the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, where broken pottery is mended and the cracks are highlighted instead of hidden. The repaired object isn’t returned to some imagined original state. The history of what happened stays visible.

That idea has stayed with me. Maybe because I spend a lot of my working life with people trying hard to work out what to do with something that no longer fits the life they’ve built. From the outside, everything can look fine. Work gets done, other people get looked after, decisions get made, and the usual responsibilities carry on. But something has become hard to ignore. It might be a relationship, or work, or a decision put off too long, or a sense that life has narrowed. The hardest part is often that there’s no obvious disaster to point to.

For capable, thoughtful people, getting stuck feels especially frustrating. You’ve probably examined the situation from every angle, read about it, talked it through with people you trust, and reached several reasonable explanations. You’re still going in circles.

That’s one thing I find interesting about counselling. I don’t see my job as handing you instructions for putting your life back together, and I don’t think more analysis is always the answer. Sometimes you need somewhere to set everything down for a while. Somewhere to say the thing that doesn’t quite make sense yet. Somewhere to notice the pattern you couldn’t see from inside it.

We can think carefully, question assumptions, and look at what’s actually happening. When it gets clearer what matters, we can think about what you might do. That could mean repair, or change, or accepting something rather than fixing it. Sometimes it means you stop spending so much energy making something look as though it never happened.

Counselling doesn’t need to take you apart and reassemble you. It can be a place to understand the cracks and the joins and what you want to do with them now.

I left the exhibition thinking about that. Stepping away from a problem can be part of thinking it through properly, even when the stepping away is a walk, an art show, and a painting that follows you home in your head. That’s time well spent.