This DRAFT is the first in a series of occasional personal reflections on repair. I acknowledge major conceptual leaps and bounds that need fleshing out. My hope is that through these explorations a coherent understanding of repair will emerge that will contribute positively to how we conduct our lives. Or, at least, to how I conduct my life.
Fixit Clinics, Repair Cafés, Restart Parties and their various permutations — Philly Fixers, Fixers Collective, Repair PDX, Fixit Fest, Repair Rodeo, and many more …
All are community repair events: occasional gatherings where volunteers who know how to fix things get together in libraries, churches and other public spaces to help neighbors repair their broken stuff. Their “stuff” is usually just that — not costly items, but things people just want fixed for reasons sentimental, practical, or principled. Repairs can be quick, or can be long, drawn-out affairs as volunteers work with participants to investigate and problem-solve to a fix. Or to declare items irreparable.
Events are often punctuated with bell-ringing, cheers and applause with the regular announcements of successful repairs. Photos document beaming owners, volunteers, newly repaired objects, and enthusiastically displayed signs reading “FIXED!!”; then are posted to social media, re-postings and “loved’s” zipping them around the globe.
Delighted participants exclaim, “This is so great! You should have more of these!”
Stepping back for a broader view of what’s going on, it’s clear that at many community repair events a good portion of repairs are discretionary actions reflecting something other than economic necessity. It’s that “something other” that has caught my attention, that draws me into these reflections.
A number of questions arise. Among them: Why make these repairs when the time and effort spent far exceed any economic sense? Why does the room erupt in bell ringing, hoots and hollers every time a repair is called out? There’s a tone of joy, goodwill, generosity, and gratitude at many community repair events — what is that about?
An immediate answer is that in our heart of hearts we know, consciously or not, that caring for what we have is right and good. Aligning our actions with our values is deeply satisfying and worthy of celebration. And rejoicing in community comes naturally — human beings are social beings.
But there’s more here: These repair event-specific questions lead to deeper questions, questions showing up in the major philosophical and religious traditions over the millennia: How do we regard the inevitable breakages in life? How do we understand disruption? How do we make sense of encountering our world not as (we think) it should be? How do we respond and what is the quality of our response? [disruption - Note 1]
Recent scholarship asserts that when we perceive and understand, we’re not seeing universal truths and eternal realities, but are grasping provisional and finite renderings that are shaped by our cultural context and our personal experience (which are themselves also effectively made up). That is, though spanning the millennia, those dominant ways of seeing the world, ways that structure our lives, give them meaning and seem so solid, are actually ever-evolving stories.
Slight shift of gears: A subject wrestled mightily with in those millennia-spanning traditions is choice. Do we have real choice in how we lead our lives?
Seems to me that while our lives are profoundly shaped by our larger social context and by what happens to us individually, if perception and understanding are effectively made up (i.e., “constructs”), then discretion is inherently present. That is, even when we don’t realize it, while there’s the momentum of cultural and experiential conditioning in our reflexes, there’s still an element of discretion in perception, understanding and response, which means there’s room for choice.
So choice is inherent in how we perceive, understand and respond to what we encounter in life, and the spirit of that choice speaks to its direction. Relative to encountering something broken, the tone of our choice leads to either engaging with, or turning from. The quality of our choice inclines either toward embracing or discarding, joining or severing, reconciling or damning, hoping or resigning, acting or quitting, assuming agency or acquiescing to disenfranchisement. [Note 2]
When we encounter the broken, we can choose how to respond.
We can choose to lean into either
Caring for, or Disregarding
[Care - Note 3]
[Dis - re - guard - Note 4]
Humans are social beings — our existence and survival depend on the content and quality of a vast network of relationships with other people and the material world in the present and across time. Care — which is both inherently relational and intrinsically seeking the salutary — is the life-affirming response to breakage in our relational reality. Care means survival, and a sense of right and good is care inflected through human affect. In our heart of hearts we know responding to breakage with care is right and good because care resonates with well-being.
When we’ve stayed with something with an attentive, open, and expectant regard — in caring relationship — we invite possibility to surface in the midst of disarray. Expecting life-affirming resolution to emerge is the essence of hope, and in the many, many times a day that we turn to fixing the inevitable and seemingly endless instances of breakage we encounter, we are likewise endlessly choosing life, and are manifesting upwellings of hope.
The eruption of applause and hootin’ and hollerin’ at community repair events is spontaneous and exuberant because we’ve witnessed and participated with others in affirming life, in manifesting hope not just in an object being repaired, but in moving with that most fundamental inclination of the human heart —> engaging, connecting, relating intimately with others and with the material world we live in. We’ve embodied right and good. We’ve embodied care.
The life force of repair is hope.
The ground of repair is care.
Of course we celebrate!
Fixing ~ Tending ~ Mending
An Ethos Grounded in Care
These comments reflect the influence of work by Steven J. Jackson, Shannon Mattern, Walter Freeman, and Joan Tronto; of the Tibetan Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo; with further influence from John Steinbeck’s Lee (East of Eden), Virginia Woolf’s Lily Briscoe (To the Lighthouse), and Leo Tolstoy’s Lévin (Anna Karenina), as well as Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams) and Jerome Bruner (Making Stories). And surely many more that don’t leap to mind just now.
Note 1: Disrupt — etymology: break up, torn, severed, borrowed from Latin disruptus (dis - apart + rumpere - to break). See RUPTURE - the breaking of a vein, violation of a treaty, breach… (Chambers Dictionary of Etymology)
Note 2: I know life is not lived in binomial opposites. Fine. But I’ll use this convention as a placeholder for the directionality I’m suggesting and return to restate when I have a better grasp of the nuance.
Note 3: Care — etymology: “Old English carian, cearian ‘be anxious or solicitous; grieve; feel concern or interest,’ from Proto-Germanic *karo- ‘lament,’ hence ‘grief, care’ … the prehistoric sense development is from ‘cry’ to "lamentation" to ‘grief.’ A different sense evolution is represented in related Dutch karig ‘scanty, frugal,’ German karg ‘stingy, scanty.’ … Positive senses, such as ‘have an inclination’ (1550s); ‘have fondness for’ (1520s) seem to have developed later as mirrors to the earlier negative ones.” (https://www.etymonline.com/) [Comment: This isn’t the etymology I would have cared to see — demands further reflection on what we mean when we say “care”.]
Note 4: Disregard — etymology: (dis - opposite of + regard - pay attention to). See REGARD.
Regard - consider, pay attention to, borrowed from Old French regarder, take notice of, look at, watch (re - intensive + guarder - look, heed, watch); see GUARD.
Guard - care, custody, protection; borrowed from Middle French guarde guardian, warden, keeper … (Chambers Dictionary of Etymology)