If you do not agree with the phases of the moon, get a ladder and repair it.
— Hausa (Nigerian) proverb
Repare / Repair
Let’s begin with the prefix re-. It is defined by etymologists as a word-forming element. The Oxford English Dictionary takes the position that it is “impossible to attempt a complete record of all the forms resulting from its use; the number of these is practically infinite.” The essential meaning of re-, from the Old French and Latin, is “back to the original place; again, anew, once more.” Its Indo-European derivation is “to turn.” And so this spare, two-letter prefix has the power to relate an astonishingly rich constellation of meanings.
Many words have more than one definition, but etymologists claim that repair really should be two separate words — repare and repair. The fact that we have one word — repair — with two meanings is an accident of history.
When we fix or mend a broken or damaged thing, we repair, meaning “restore,” “rehabilitate,” “renovate,” “renew,” “reinforce,” “reconcile,” or “redeem.” It’s the opposite of “wreck,” “worsen,” or “destroy.” The Old French root is repare, and it traces back to the Latin “to prepare again,” which seems to shuttle back and forth in time (“shall we begin again?”). In its use, repair always references and embodies a before and an after. And in common usage, we easily apply this meaning to all kinds of life situations: repairing physical things, repairing a system, repairing relationships, repairing an injustice or inequity, which may include reparations.
But our English word repair has a second definition, with an entirely different history. Here the Old French root is repairer, with a very specific meaning: it refers to animals that return to their home in a burrow or a den (their lair). This word had the misfortune of being similar to repare and entering English almost simultaneously.
And so, etymologists say that by rights we really should be using two different words: repare to mend and repair to return home. “Sorry,” says Merriam-Webster, “it’s too late to fix this problem.” But I delight in the way these two meanings intertwine. It is a deepening. Repair mends and heals, and repair returns us to a place of comfort, nurture, or solace. Repair completes us. Repair calls us home.
We all have our broken pieces, emotionally, spiritually in this life. Nobody gets away unhurt. We’re always trying to find somebody whose broken pieces fit with our broken pieces and something whole emerges.
— Bruce Springsteen
A Connection Has Been Lost
When we started our first Repair Cafes in the Hudson Valley, we figured that most broken items would need replacement parts to get working again. Repairs require parts, right? But as we got into it, a quite different picture emerged. Most machines stop working because a connection has been lost. That connection may be mechanical, electrical, or digital. Two pieces that are supposed to transfer energy and information in a very specific way no longer do. There’s a break, a crack, a tear, a short, a fray, a wrinkle, or a stretch. The repair lies in finding and reestablishing that lost connection. In a remarkable number of cases, the “fix” is simply cleaning.
A fix may also have to do with the fit. The term from anatomy is articulation, the way bones and ligaments in our bodies are joined to provide structure and strength as well as movement. Within any useful thing, you want the parts to be well articulated: to fit properly so that they interact and adjust as they should. Woodworkers know that joinery is essential to the craft, and the goal is always that joints be snug and solid. If not, chairs will wobble, tables will skew, and drawers won’t pull as they were designed to. To make the metaphorical leap, all of these kinds of connection and articulation extend to our social and economic world, and to all of the businesses, institutions, organizations, and activities that give order to our everyday lives.
Quite a few of our repair coaches are engineers, and they will gladly, even gleefully, point you to the second law of thermodynamics: the entropy of any isolated system always increases. A physicist will talk about entropy in terms of energy, a biologist in terms of organization, but in all cases it runs in one direction only: systems run down, things fall into disorder. But these definitions apply to a closed system, and it is the job of the repairer to open up the system, the object in front of them, and put energy into it, to restore order and to “fix it.” “My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don’t get right,” said biologist T.H. Huxley a hundred years ago. Don Grice, whose career was at IBM and who has become deeply invested in the repair ethic, likes to tease: “We really should call these Entropy Reduction Cafes, but I suspect that wouldn’t attract too many people.”
Broken World Thinking
In his essay “Rethinking Repair,” Steven Jackson, a professor of information and science and technology studies at Cornell, introduces a thought experiment he calls “broken world thinking.” Which world do we live in? he provocatively asks. “Is it the imaginary nineteenth-century world of progress and advance, novelty and invention, open frontiers and endless development? Or the twenty-first-century world of risk and uncertainty, growth and decay, and fragmentation, dissolution, and breakdown?” Depending on where you choose to look, you will find ample evidence of both, but I think Jackson wants us to consider more than a choice between nostalgia and the real world. This is not simply a glass-half-empty, glass-half-full observation. He is asking us to get real about the world around us.
It is a great irony that here in the twenty-first century more people than ever before are living in prosperity, while at the same time, whole cultures are seeing their homelands becoming uninhabitable, and the extinction of perhaps a million species in the coming decades is underway. These two realities coexist and are relentlessly feeding a positive feedback loop of resource depletion and ecological instability.
Broken world thinking asks two things of us: a clear-eyed acknowledgment that the world we have built has outpaced our ability to maintain it, and a “deep wonder and appreciation of the subtle arts of repair” that are critical to reestablishing and maintaining stability and balance, and essential to “new combinations and new possibilities.”
Jackson calls repair a “fulcrum” between these two worlds, arguing that innovation in actual practice is limited unless it is extended, sustained, and completed through repair. By paying attention to both parts of this worldview, we find a mindset that is hopeful and realistic, and that demands productive, even audacious, responses and solutions in every sector of society.
Repair is a radical act of resistance to the unmaking of our environment and our world.
Repair is a humble act of resistance to the unmaking of our environment and our world.
Both are true.
REPAIR AND RELATIVITY
Repair is an inescapably timely phenomenon, bridging past and future in distinctive and sometimes surprising ways. It accounts for the durability of the old, but also the appearance of the new. It fills in the moments of hope and fear in which bridges from old worlds to new worlds are built, and the continuity of order, value and meaning gets woven, one tenuous thread at a time. And it does all this quietly, humbly, and all the time.
— Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair
Always, the family of repair activities shares the aim of maintaining some kind of continuity with the past in the face of breaks or ruptures to that continuity.
— Elizabeth V. Spelman, Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World
Time is visible in a person’s clothing, and repairing it is essentially about preserving a relationship. Sometimes the garment will have been the property of someone who has died, so repairing it enables the relationship to continue. The act of mending artfully is a form of caring and memorialization.
— Celia Pym, I Didn’t Ever See the Point of Invisible Mending
Tinkering
You can trace the idea of “tinkering” back hundreds of years. In history and in folklore, to “tink” was to rivet, and a tinker was an itinerant fixer of pots and pans and other mainstays of kitchen and domestic life. Blade sharpening was also a specialty. And so tinkers would present their skills to the women of the house who oversaw such matters. In their best light, tinkers were resourceful and perhaps a good source of local news and gossip as they traveled around. But they lived on the fringes, and folklore is full of stories of tinkers who were not always to be trusted, or who might be tinged with magic. In the mid-twentieth century, tinker transformed into tinkerer, and the epithet “basement or backyard tinkerer” — the husband usually — called up the dictionary definition of the verb tinker: “an attempt to repair or improve…often to no useful effect.” The romance was gone.
Fast-forward to this generation — when tinkering occupies an entirely different realm. The “tinkering mindset” embodies a seemingly intuitive understanding of broken world thinking. It has been described as technical work with a cultural attitude. Tinkering has also become a potent form of storytelling, mythmaking, entertainment, and performance. David Malki! (yes, he spells his name with an exclamation point) is a writer and illustrator in Los Angeles who has created a website called Wondermark. There you will find his weekly comic strips and his “nominally essential” and very tongue-in-cheek Tinkerer’s Handbook: The Magazine for People Who Cannot Leave Well Enough Alone, in which he encourages us to “Take It Apart” and issues his Rallying Cry for a Generation: “Let us meddle.” Malki! delights in tinkering’s steampunk connotations, and he champions all manner of creativity and repair as a rebellion against idleness and entropy.
In her fascinating 2017 book Tinkering, Australian journalist Katherine Wilson analyzes a culture of individuals with “an impulsive habit of material problem solving.” She profiles the kinds of tinkerers you will find in every postindustrial society. Tinkering across the globe reveals the cross-cultural passion for questioning and challenging how we engage with the material world. Many tinkerers think of the mending, adapting, creating, modifying, repurposing, and improvising they do in their homes simply as “unremarkable, ordinary, obvious and common-sense living.” Others quite consciously see tinkering as a social movement, “idealized as a radical and transformative act against powerful forces.” In her research, Wilson says she came to realize that “this ineffable thing called tinkering had its roots and branches in social justice, civil liberties, digital communities, legal frontiers and urban sustainability.” The global tinkering community, just like the global repair and maker communities, is highly social and networked.
The Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, has also examined this seemingly archaic practice. Research director David Pescovitz writes: “Despite its fascination with things and bits, tinkering is resolutely human-focused: you don’t make things ‘better’ in some dry technical sense, you make them work better for you. Tinkerers modify everything from cars, computers, and cellphones, to virtual worlds and computer code. They are driven by a desire to experiment, to make existing technologies more useful, and to customize them to better suit users’ needs.” And in Pescovitz’s blog, technology forecaster Alex Pang adds: “Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today’s needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. The same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow we will tinker with the world.”
Repairing shares all of these attributes, and repairing and tinkering overlap and reinforce each other in all kinds of ways. Do our skilled volunteers at Repair Cafes and Fixit Clinics see themselves as tinkerers? Some clearly do, although we can allow for differences in personality and points of view. The engineers and former engineers among them, used to working in very top-down environments, may not embrace the tinkerer characterization, which tends to be very bottom-up, but nonetheless they will share many viewpoints broadly, such as the value of reverse engineering and the “work-around.” Repair coaches routinely are faced with the challenge of finding a way to make a fix without the benefit of a new part or the ideal tool — and so they improvise. “It’s the ability to look at things maybe two degrees off-center,” says repair coach Tom Joscelyn. “Suddenly solutions come.” The other side of the coin? Some tinkerers might prefer to work alone, while at repair events, we encourage collaboration. Working-around and working together are strategies that increase our repair success rate.
And what about the kids? Erik Hoover, a professional woodworker and repair coach in the Hudson Valley, says: “My sixteen-year-old son sometimes comes to me and says, ‘Hey Dad, you want to tinker?’ He brings home old electronics, like gaming consoles, from our Transfer Station — a great resource for tinkerers. As a consumer of sophisticated technology, he couldn’t believe, for example, how primitive speaker wires are. And it’s just great to watch him peel back the layers of the analogue insides of something and figure it out. He’s got nerve.”
Maintenance
John recalls: My first real summer job was before college at a small chemical plant in New Jersey. I learned to drive a barrel-lift and I worked on the bottling assembly line when that cranked up, but mostly I got to be the maintenance man’s assistant. Everything I can claim to know about electricity and plumbing I learned from Jim that summer. It was an education I have valued ever since. But I also remember in grade school how we all smirked when someone called our school janitor a “maintenance engineer.” We knew he swept the floors; I had no appreciation for everything else he did. Until I was the one sweeping the floors at my chemical plant job.
Throughout history, maintenance and repair have been the most widespread types of technical expertise by far. Most people would be surprised to learn that today worldwide, engineers who are devoted to maintenance outnumber those involved with design or innovation by about three to one. And that does not begin to include the enormous number of independent repairs carried out in the home and in every nook and cranny of our lives. The degree to which we take this for granted is remarkable. We notice maintenance mostly in its absence, of course — when things break. But the role of maintenance has rapidly evolved from a taken-for-granted aspect of our world into a central strategic concern. The power grid in the United States has been called the most sophisticated machine ever invented, and experts agree that it is in critical need of modernization. (The fact that this is actually being accomplished as a condition for integrating wind and solar energy is not acknowledged often enough.) The prospect of system failure or sabotage to the power grid or the internet is something most of us don’t want to think about.
Maintenance engineers offer a cost-benefit analysis they call the “iceberg model.” At the tip of the iceberg, in plain sight, are all the traditional direct costs of maintenance: labor and materials, contracts, and overheads. Hidden below the surface is 80 percent of the iceberg, the costs that come as a result of reduced asset life, lower-quality performance, higher energy costs, lost production, wasted resources, late deliveries, safety risks, and environmental costs. A full cost-accounting will show that the indirect costs may add up to as much as five times the direct costs. The bottom line is that avoiding or delaying maintenance means a loss of profit and lower sustainability, which is why the phrase “deferred maintenance” means so much to investors.
In the United States, professionals and academics in the field have organized as the Maintainers, and in Europe an annual Festival of Maintenance is “a celebration of those who maintain different parts of our world, and how they do it, recognizing the often hidden work done in repair, custodianship, stewardship, tending and caring for the things that matter.” But as recently as 2007, David Edgerton, perhaps our foremost historian of technology, was able to dismiss the efficacy of repair in our economy: “In rich countries, as far as domestic equipment is concerned…repair no longer exists — from electric toasters to fridges, repair is hardly worth carrying out — and not surprisingly the networks of retailer/repairers are long gone. A new toaster retails for less than an hour of repair time.”
Edgerton also identifies the result of this in world trade: secondhand goods move from rich countries where they’re being thrown “away” because they’re no longer working properly or wanted, to poorer countries that have not lost their culture of repair and maintenance. You can bring just about anything to a city market in an emerging economy and get it fixed. Ugo Valauri, a cofounder of Restart — the repair movement in the UK — says, “We’ve been inspired by different practices elsewhere in the world, where some of us have traveled — Kenya, India, and Cuba — and meeting people who would never think to throw things away. They maintain them and repair them. That is the mindset we want.”
It is often the case that items brought to us for repair are not really broken, but simply haven’t been cared for in the most commonsense ways. Occasional cleaning (from vacuum cleaners to laptops), descaling (coffee makers), or lubricating (most things with moving parts) is often enough to keep a product functioning for a good long time. It is true that, years ago, “maintenance free” became a selling point, and manufacturers would have you believe their product requires no care. This of course is not entirely true, yet it has enabled a further level of de-skilling. The majority of vacuum cleaners left on curbs likely just need to be unclogged. Marine Postma observes, and we certainly agree, that many people no longer see maintenance as a self-evident task to be taken care of at home, as part of everyday life, which underscores the general lack of repair knowledge in society.
Stories about making new things are ten a penny. Less common are stories about keeping things as good as new.
—The Economist
As with so many things, surprises can be costly, and there is a critical difference between anticipating events and reacting to events, with the strategic benefit always accruing to those who look ahead. The more complex the system, the greater the risk of the unexpected. Maintenance engineers identify four categories of repair that are concurrent in their industry. Preventative maintenance aims to detect and correct latent faults before they become operational faults. Corrective maintenance responds to failures. Adaptive maintenance is a response to changes in the environment. And the goal of perfective maintenance is to eliminate inefficiencies and improve performance, which can elevate maintenance from an operational overhead to a profit contributor. Some maintenance consulting firms expand the list to include, for example, “failure-finding maintenance,” which focuses on backup equipment that isn’t required to function until something else has failed. An example of this is your home smoke detector, which your fire department reminds you to test every October. Homeowners will benefit from all of these practices too, of course. AARP magazine recommends that you set aside 1 percent of your home’s value each year for maintenance and repairs.
Wabi-Sabi?
How are we to reconcile the precise demands of maintenance in our modern world with the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of wabi-sabi, which finds beauty in imperfection? To repair something is not to make it new again, but to renew its purpose and function. Many of the visitors to our Repair Cafes are already aware of this distinction. When Marie Young brought her lightweight folding shopping cart to our very first Repair Cafe in the Hudson Valley, the hub of one wheel was broken and beyond repair. The fix was to fabricate a replacement hub with a circle of wood. It was imperfect, practical, and beautiful, all at the same time. Marie said, “Looks wonderful to me. I need that darn cart!”
Perhaps without realizing it, Marie had found a homespun way to express the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of wabi-sabi, which prizes the beauty of imperfection. “We live in a world of things,” architect and scholar Leonard Koren writes. “Discoloration, rust, nicks, dents, peeling and other forms of attrition are a testament to histories of use and misuse. Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom from things.”
Wabi-sabi is associated with Zen Buddhism, and the language used to talk about it, when it is used at all, is poetic rather than technical. The wabi-sabi worldview is a choice: to take pleasure in things that are imperfect, impermanent, and unpretentious. You cannot insist on the beauty of rust or the simplicity of peeling paint. It is voluntary. Things wabi-sabi may be unconventional and incomplete, oddly misshapen, or even ugly to some, and this explains the phrase “Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness.” You can make a pretty good party game out of it too: to start, just point to an object and ask, “Wabi-sabi?”
Craeft
In his introduction to Diary of an Early American Boy, 1805 (the text of which includes the actual verbatim diary of Noah Blake, who lived in a small New England town), historian and illustrator Eric Sloane writes, “The good things of the past were not so often articles as the manner in which people lived or the things that people thought. This, of course, is still true; the fine TV sets and modern kitchen appliances we prize now will be junk within a matter of years; the lasting examples of our time will turn out to be the ways that we live or the things that we think.”
Repair culture asks us to take greater notice of how the things in our lives were made and whose hands they passed through before coming into ours. The historic Locust Lawn House and Farm in Gardiner, New York, regularly holds events they call “The Timeless Art of Repair.” Local experts demonstrate “antique skills”: pewter ware and metalwork, wood planing and joinery, darning, felting, and other waning arts. Right next to the tinsmith is someone changing the belt on a vacuum cleaner or fixing a coffee maker. It’s a juxtaposition that engages people’s curiosity and gets them thinking about what is well made and what is not.
In his book Craeft, British archaeologist and medieval historian Alexander Langlands explores the deeper meanings of a thousand-year-old English word mostly lost in its original usage: “It should be more than just about making. It is the power, the force, the knowledge and the wisdom behind making — the craeft behind it…an extended definition where a sense of ‘wisdom’ and ‘resourcefulness’ surpass in importance the notion of ‘physical skill.’” Langlands looks at the true trajectory of craft production like so:
Tended landscape → sustainable production of raw materials → intelligently processed → beautifully made → fit for purpose → fondly used → ingeniously reused → considerately discarded → given back to the earth
This vision is at the heart of the circular or regenerative economy: choosing materials that will last, understanding their properties, and knowing how to care for them. Repairing and reusing the things we own is far more “resource efficient” than recycling. Think about it: when we repair something, everything that was needed to make it is preserved and intact, embodied within it: the energy, the materials, all of the time and talents required to manufacture it. When we recycle, much of that is lost. When we throw something “away” and buy something new, all of that is lost.
But the loss may run even deeper. In her book Lifting Depression, Kelly Lambert, a behavioral neuroscience researcher, writes, “What I’ve discovered is that there’s a critical link between symptoms of depression and key areas of the brain involved with motivation, pleasure, movement and thought.” She calls it an “effort-driven rewards circuit” that is “generated by doing certain types of physical activities, especially ones that involve your hands, which give us an emotional sense of well-being.” When our lives are full of “effortless-driven rewards” — a consumer culture that doesn’t require much in the way of knowledge or imagination — Lambert believes the conditions for unhappiness may be more prevalent.
Britain’s Health Ministry, in response to statistics that revealed the “mass prescribing” of antidepressants for one in six adults, is supporting programs that expand opportunities for people to work with their hands. Men’s Sheds is a prime example; it’s a movement that started in Australia and has spread throughout the United Kingdom, and is now augmented with Fix It Sisters Sheds. The negative impact of loneliness and isolation on a person’s health and well-being is well established, and the informal groups of guys and women who call themselves “shedders” are responding by getting together to tinker, build, repair, share skills, and spend time. This way of addressing twenty-first-century social needs may not entail the traditions and slow mastering of technique that characterize craeft, but it nonetheless provides, in Langlands’s words, “a hand-eye-head-heart-body coordination that furnishes us with a meaningful understanding of the materiality of our world.”
Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
— Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”
Mending Made Visible
Historically, of course, clothing repairs that attracted attention were an embarrassment, a sign of poverty or want. Today, visible mending has emerged as a creative trend that’s bridging generations, from experienced seamstresses and fiber artists to kids and punks. Simply stated, visible mending is mending that is meant to be noticed. Seamstresses with their sewing machines at Repair Cafes are always busy, but we find that visible mending engages people in a different way. In her essay “Mendfulness and the Long Journey to Repair,” visible mending crafter and author Katrina Rodabaugh adopts the word mendfulness. “It simply implies there is an intersection between mending and being mindful. That there is an intention to repair but furthermore to pay attention or to witness, to be thoughtful, and then to attempt to act from this place.”
Dawn Elliott, a historian and Repair Cafe hand-sewing expert, counsels simply: “If your desire is a garment that is repairable, go for buttons or snaps. Stay away from zippers. And accept that repairs likely will not be invisible.” Dawn can teach you darning (anchor yarn in the fabric at the edge of a hole, carry it across the gap and anchor it on the other side, and fill the hole with crisscrossing running stitches) or felting (separate, tangle, and relock yarn or wool fibers by stabbing them repeatedly with a felting hook).
Now imagine using those same techniques, but with different fibers of contrasting colors. It is flat-out fun to see the way groups gather around the textile table. Raheli Harper, who shows our visitors these skills at the Repair Cafe in Warwick, New York, takes delight in the freedom of mending that’s colorful and clever. “Mending embraces the fact that when we wear clothes on our bodies we are wearing them out. We embrace the whole imperfect story of our lives — we make mistakes, we tear our clothes and/or lives. And yet we also have the tools to heal and recover. For me, mending is a practice to embrace and celebrate our imperfect damaged selves and a road to healing those breaks.” Plus, the strong pull of fashion has always included the way we use it to construct our identity, and so mending as a personal statement actually fulfills some of the same symbolic and psychological satisfaction we get when we shop.
You will now find mending circles and workshops in every part of the country, a sign that the appeal of mending in groups of friends around a table has taken hold. Sashiko embroidery, a popular technique for simple and durable patching, uses a universal running stitch and thicker thread and is easy to learn. Mending circles nestle very comfortably within Repair Cafes, and we like to introduce hand-sewing DIY workshops with the question: “Your mother (or grandmother) knew. Do you?”
The cross-generational appeal is especially striking. Lisa Z. Morgan, department head for apparel design at the Rhode Island School of Design, says she senses a revolution through the needle and thread. Students she’s working with are hyperaware of the wastefulness and toxicity in the fast-fashion industry, and they see it as “fighting talk to be repairing, reworking, remaking and mending.” Their passion emerges out of individual commitments that are political, ethical, or personal, and for some students, it is a way of coping with anxieties about the future. Plus they get to hang out and be creative without having to spend money. Lisa even sees it in the punk-skater-tagging subculture as she watches her son and some of his friends stitching the jeans they’ve torn skateboarding, “like miniature swords they’re wielding with thread.” Badges of honor. You will find thousands of examples of visible mending on Instagram and Pinterest.
FIX THE WORLD IN COLORS
The concept of repair as a cultural and political expression came from activist artists. In Amsterdam in 2008, the artist collective Platform21 started with the idea that “repair is underestimated as a creative, cultural and economic force.” They proceeded to organize exhibitions (which Martine Postma covered as a journalist and was inspired by), outfit a “repair truck” to take to street fairs, and hold a Most Remarkable Repair Contest, with the first prize going to a woman who repaired the plastic bags that got caught in her bicycle tires. That same year in Brooklyn, New York, an interdisciplinary arts venue known as Proteus Gowanus started its Fixers Collective in response to the 2008 recession and to “promote a counter-ethos that values functionality, simplicity, and ingenuity and that respects age, persistence and adequacy.”
But a year before either of those projects, Berlin artist Jan Vormann started filling crumbling niches of buildings and streetscapes with Legos of all colors. From the beginning, Jan hoped others would pick up on the idea, and indeed it has become a worldwide participatory phenomenon. “Fix the world in colors,” he declares, and on the website he created, dispatchwork.info, you will find an interactive map showing the hundreds of places where Lego repairs have been made, many with pictures and the story of why the spot was chosen. One reads:
Jan gave me a bag of LEGO, before I travelled to South Kurdistan for the art project ‘Space 21.’ I promised to find a place for his work. When I visited the Amna Suraka (the red museum), the former prison of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service, where the Kurds were tortured until the liberation in 1991, I felt that this place had a very sad energy that needed Jan’s positive and colourful work as a symbol for a brighter future. When you walk through the main entrance of Amna Suraka you find the Dispatchwork at the building in front of you on the upper left side of the facade.
Agency
In social science, agency is the ability of individuals to act on their intentions to make something happen. These actions take place within social, economic, and environmental structures that enable or limit our agency, both as individuals and as groups. This is perhaps the most fundamental way of examining the human condition, and repair and reuse are one small way we can be agents of change in our lives. The impulse here is to reclaim something we may feel we’ve lost. “Control of my world has been taken away from me, and I want it back.” Cracked smartphone screens, unresponsive coffee makers, printers that won’t print — we’d like to fix them, but when repair is not an option we end up replacing them instead. We feel trapped by planned obsolescence. Repair culture aims to establish the agency of repair and reuse as social norms, as a way of challenging and remaking the ecology of our economy.
In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford considers the merits of “individual agency in a shared world.” He admires the self-reliance that repair and maintenance offer us, and he wonderfully describes the way we feel when we become competent in our chosen activity, the excitement of seeing the practical results of our efforts. Individual agency, he says, is at the core of being human. But Crawford also cautions against the kind of self-reliance or agency that is self-absorbed. When we get to a place where we feel our judgments are truer and better, it is usually because we have sought the wisdom of others who are more experienced than we are. “For in fact we are basically dependent beings: one upon another in a world that is not of our making.”
Here in the Age of the Anthropocene, we are facing the imperative for shared agency on a global scale. In 2017, Paul Hawken edited Drawdown, a book with the ambitious goal of providing a blueprint for “drawing down” the carbon in our oceans and atmosphere — that is, reversing global warming in our shared world. Project Drawdown breaks down this huge challenge into one hundred strategies and contends that most of the tools and ideas we need are already in use around the globe. Once a year, Project Drawdown brings together a couple hundred climate educators and activists at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. In 2018, Martine Postma was invited to speak about repair as a Drawdown strategy. The organizers titled her presentation “Repair Cafe: Creating Agency through Fixing Stuff and Strengthening Communities” and positioned it in this way: “The full range and beneficial impact of climate solutions have not been explained in a way that bridges the divide between urgency and agency. As a result, the aspirations of people who want to enact meaningful solutions remain largely untapped.”
At the conference, Martine built her case for the agency of repair as an experienced journalist does, brick by brick. Repair is not, she conceded, the fastest way to reduce global warming, but it does directly address a modern problem we all recognize: “Things break, and when they do, most people just don’t know what to do anymore. They have no repair skills, they have no tools, and no time to focus on the subject. And so, when something breaks, they feel helpless.” At the same time, she said, there are people in every community who do know how to make repairs, and who are so fond of tinkering that they are more than happy to help their neighbors and try to fix things together.
Repair Cafes have been Martine’s singular contribution, fitting together our individual and social characters like the convex and concave sides of a curve. “Repair Cafe connects people with their common sense and their inner feeling of what’s right,” she said at the conclusion of her presentation. “When you take the time to make a repair, you realize that it’s actually a very normal thing to do. And when you succeed, it makes you feel strong. It empowers you, and when communities are empowered they’re capable of achieving more together. That’s the kind of mindset we need for a more sustainable future.”
Tikkun Olam
Somewhere in the teachings of every wisdom tradition on earth is the admonition to “make whole that which is broken.” In Judaism, it is tikkun olam, “repair of the world.” It is said that in the eyes of God, an object that has been repaired is more holy than one that is new. There is an interpretation in Judaism of the world as we see it and of how it came to be; it is a retelling of the Genesis story by the sixteenth-century mystic Isaac Luria. In his vision, Luria saw that God filled the entire universe completely and perfectly and that the world could only be created by somehow making a space for life. Luria imagined that God contracted, like a series of containers within containers, and by becoming smaller and smaller, God allowed a new creation to emerge. When the enormous energy and potential of that creation finally exploded outward, sparks of the divine scattered throughout the universe: the universe we see. The teachings that follow from this, in the wisdom tradition of the Kabbalah, tell us that we are to gather the shards and the sparks and bring them back together. This is the meaning of tikkun olam. Olam, or “world,” comes from the same root as hidden, and so the repair we are asked to accomplish requires that we see the sacred hidden within the ordinary — the wholeness that exists in all things, everywhere.
This specific idea of “seeing the sacred in the ordinary” was the premise of a television series called New Morning that coauthor John produced for six seasons. It was a radically interfaith, intercultural, and intergenerational program that told stories of people from all walks of life, sharing their sense of everyday spirituality: a Boston pie shop owner, a Chicano radio station DJ, an urban ecologist in Atlanta. A regular voice in the programs was Irwin Kula, an eighth-generation rabbi and author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life.
“So often in religion we start with a stain or a sin or moral judgment because that’s where the brokenness is supposed to be,” Irwin says, “instead of recognizing that, no, the normal course of life is that we mess up and things get broken. There’s a wisdom in that brokenness, and once we see that, we can actually get to fixing it.”
Irwin identifies the two levels of tikkun olam. The first is repair of the self, our interior world. When we are disconnected from the center of our own consciousness, we are also disconnected from the divine. The second layer is repair of the external world. It is our responsibility to “manifest and enact” compassion and justice in the world. “We see our separateness from each other as the cause of poverty, injustice, and suffering,” Irwin writes. “Broken shards are everywhere waiting for us to retrieve them and to put them back together. But what if, in lamenting the world’s brokenness and working toward Oneness, we extinguish those sparks? Suppose in our drive to love the whole we exile the parts? What if the shattering itself is the point?”
This emphasis on the dignity of the pieces and the parts is indeed true wherever repair takes place. Examining the parts is essential to the process. Without them, pieces of the puzzle — important parts of the story — are missing, even if, or especially when, it turns out a piece needs to be replaced. Wholeness isn’t uniformity — wholeness is multiplicity. “Repair Cafe makes it okay and laudable and, to use a more religious word, praiseworthy to bring your broken stuff. When you can still dignify the broken, that’s when you can actually work on it. Beloved and broken, not broken and broken. To be human together is to fix things together.”
In Hebrew, the image of the word for blessing is a wellspring, the flow between the human and the divine. “The metaphor is so rich,” Irwin says. “Through our actions at the repair table, we’re opening the flow. We’re repairing the circuit, and both sides — the human and the divine — are there already. A place of knowledge and community. Tikkun olam Cafes.”
BY THE TIME YOU ARE REAL
One afternoon at Repair Cafe, a boy of six or seven years old brought in his stuffed puppy for repair. He told us that he would fall asleep every night by pressing and stroking the ear between his fingers, and the fabric of its ear was now worn with use. Caroline, who specializes in handwork, took good care in mending the toy. When she was done, the boy wrote in our comments book: “They fixed my dog’s ear and he feels a lot better and my dog is happy and so am I.” This exchange prompted Don Grice (who does digital photo restorations) to recall this excerpt from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, one of his favorite books:
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”