This DRAFT is the second 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.
Are there values so fundamental to humankind that they are shared by all meaning-making systems around the world, and across all time?
Are there points of commonality where people can meet and see, really see each other’s humanity?
Pretty ambitious questions for this middling mind.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama famously says that people are all the same – “Everyone just wants to be happy.“
Many have observed that the world’s major religious and philosophical traditions all sport some version of The Golden Rule.
Others have recognized compassion as a value universally shared.
Me?
I suggest that an Inclination to Life is the deepest commonality, that repair is one of the main ways it shows up in our world, and that to the extent we’ve lost track of valuing repair, we’ve lost some measure of our humanity. We’ve impoverished and diminished ourselves even as we engorge ourselves through insatiable, rampant, unfettered consumption.
If we look around, an inclination to life is pretty much everywhere.
Also all around us is a lot of broken stuff. Life goes careening around and things get busted, fractured, worn down, bent, derailed…
But turns out that even in the midst of broke, that inclination to life is still operative. If you pay attention, you see repair happening right and left, especially in nature — cut skin is healing over, stumps are sprouting, burnt forests are bursting with new growth, and bones are rebuilding.
Yes, there are plenty of examples of things definitively trashed, but, entropy be damned, if there’s any room for putting order into disorder, repair’s often present.
I suggest that addressing the inevitable breakages in life with actions that support survival (a/k/a fixing stuff) is fundamental, and so is a wholesome point of commonality for humanity across space and time.