resilience

There is a moment in a-ha’s “Take On Me” when the girl looks up from her coffee and realizes the comic-book hero is looking back. It is a wonderfully 1985 idea: romance as a portal, pencil lines as a doorway, and a chorus that sounds like somebody asking for one brave chance.

Then the video does something more interesting. It refuses to let the two worlds stay separate.

If you have somehow missed it, the video moves between live action and a black-and-white comic drawn in loose pencil. The technique is rotoscoping: filming movement, then drawing over the frames. The BBC’s account of the video’s making says animator Michael Patterson spent 16 weeks sketching roughly 3,000 drawings. That is not a weekend project. That is a small mountain of patient marks.

The official credits at Patterson and Reckinger’s site name Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger as the animation directors. Their work gives the video its strange double vision: the comic feels more alive than the café, while the café feels safer than the comic. One world is exciting but dangerous. The other is ordinary but solid.

That tension is the whole song’s emotional engine. “Take On Me” is not just asking, “Do you like me?” It is asking, “Will you come with me, even though the place I’m inviting you into is unfinished?” The comic hero is literally sketched in. He has no polished edges. He is a possibility with a motorcycle.

And then comes the escape. The girl returns to the ordinary world, but the ordinary world has been altered. The strange thing has followed her home. Or perhaps she has learned to see the room differently. That is what longing often does. It does not simply make us dissatisfied with the present. It gives the present a second outline.

My favorite part is that the video does not treat reinvention as a clean makeover. There is no triumphant “new you” montage with suspiciously good lighting. The transition is messy. It involves fear, a torn page, and a person who has to decide whether the familiar world is still enough.

The song’s public life followed a similar path. Official Charts records a 19-week UK chart run, while the video became a defining example of how an ambitious visual could change a pop song’s reach. The band did not merely release a track; they built a doorway around it.

So what happened? A Norwegian band made a pop song and paired it with an unusually labor-intensive animated film. What did it mean? Millions of listeners were invited to believe that longing could be both frightening and creative. What can we carry forward? Maybe this: reinvention rarely begins with a finished plan. It begins with a line, then another, then the willingness to step through the panel before you know how the story ends.

What is one unfinished possibility you keep treating as if it needs to be polished before you can enter it?

I broke a favorite mug last month. Not dramatically—no cinematic slow motion, just an elbow, a tile floor, and the small domestic silence that follows. I swept up the pieces and wondered whether the mug had become trash or a project.

Kintsugi, the Japanese craft of repairing broken ceramics with lacquer and powdered metal, offers a third category: not new, not ruined. Re-made. Japan’s National Crafts Museum describes it as a technique for repairing cracks and chips with lacquer and gold powder, rooted in preserving objects and passing them down. That is a sturdier idea than “everything happens for a reason.” Sometimes things simply break.

The technical detail matters. Traditional repairs use urushi, a tree-based lacquer that acts as an adhesive; the gold is not the glue, but the visible finish. The Smithsonian’s Folklife program notes that a traditional project can take up to three months, and that wet urushi can irritate skin even though it is harmless once dry. In other words, the pretty line on the finished bowl is the last chapter of a long, careful process. Gold gets the photograph. Patience does the work.

That is where the metaphor becomes useful—and where I want to handle it gently. A scholarly study of kintsugi warns us not to reduce the practice to the slogan that damage automatically makes an object more beautiful. The break still names a catastrophe. The repair names an amelioration. Both remain visible. Kintsugi is not pretending the crack was secretly good news.

This has obvious applications to money. A failed business, a layoff, a foolish purchase, or a season of debt can leave a seam in the household story. We do not need to gild the mistake or turn it into a personality. We can name what happened, repair what is repairable, and let the new habits show where the work was done: a smaller fixed expense, an honest conversation, an emergency fund built one transfer at a time.

It also has a spiritual edge, though not a shortcut. The repaired bowl is not valuable because it suffered. It is valuable because someone stayed with it. Someone cleaned the edges, fitted the pieces, waited for the lacquer to cure, and refused the easy conclusion that broken means finished. That feels close to the quiet work of formation: not self-invention, but faithful return.

So, what happened? A vessel broke. What did it mean? The break became part of its history, but not the whole of it. What can we carry forward? This week, choose one damaged place—financial, relational, or inward—and ask a less heroic question: what is the next careful repair?

ravensquall

Take On Me and the Courage to Leave the Panel

Kintsugi and the Next Careful Repair