When Things Are Broken

How long does it take us to replace something that is broken? How long does it take to even notice that it's broken? Do all things broken need to be replaced? Or does it make sense that "broken" things might actually be intact and complete in and of themselves? Is our perfectionism driving us to be inherently and increasingly intolerant of brokenness?

These are some of the questions and thoughts I have been thinking about lately, following a rather mundane--but apparently rich in meaning--occurrence. Here is the story:

This past March, after about a year of ignoring it, I decided to replace the broken handle of the freezer compartment of our fridge. Actually, by the time I decided to replace it there was no handle anymore. Just two screws that had held it in place previously. The handle itself had had a total life of about 7 years. It was fine for the first 5, then it started to crack, first just a little bit, but eventually so much that touching the handle, let alone using it, meant taking the risk of breaking it completely. I had glued it several times, each time getting about a day of solidness out of it before it would crack again. When it finally broke off completely I tried glueing it one more time, but it wouldn't hold anymore. So, I unscrewed the rest of the handle that was still attached to the freezer door and threw it out. The freezer door opened fine without the handle actually, one only had to pull the door on the side. Really, the door didn't need a handle! That was in January. For two months we lived with a freezer door that didn't have a handle.

I am not sure what actually changed in March, but I decided to get the serial number of our fridge, call the store where we had purchased it and order a new handle. Two weeks and $25 later our new handle arrived. It fit, was the right size and I attached it with a sense of accomplishment and relief. Clearly, the broken handle and then its complete absence had bothered me. But I only could see that when the new handle was there.

In the next couple of days and weeks it occurred to me that inherent in this story about the freezer door handle was a larger and richer story about me and how I look at life (and possibly about others too). I had, apparently, been yearning for something, for completeness and perfection. But I had, in spite of the obvious and easy solution to this yearning, not even allowed myself to feel this yearning other than through uncounted attempts of fixing what was cracked. And even in the face of an increasing brokenness my response kept being to fix it and, lastly, improvising and circumventing the problem altogether: we don't need that handle at all; actually, there never was a handle!!

I would like to convince myself that hope was the main motivating factor in my not simply replacing the handle. And, perhaps, to some degree hope was involved. But I am not closed off to the possibility that fear and apathy may have been involved in equal proportion to hope. Something about not wanting to acknowledge loss and, possibly, death is in this experience and I want to know more about it.

The flip-side of this is that I don't easily give up on the viability of something (a plant, a tropical fish, a tool, a relationship, etc.). I see the crack, the illness, the closeness to death, but I will keep nursing it, watering it, feeding it and, quite often, I succeed. There are uncounted plants in our yard that many would have thrown out and replaced. But for me a single tiny leaf is enough to pour my energy into it. I have been rewarded many times.

So, denying death can be a powerful instrument in healing. But what worries me is that, sometimes, that denial can also be motivated by or result in a kind of complacency. Sometimes death and loss have to be acknowledged before something new can emerge. As a father of three sons I want nothing more than being able to teach my boys the distinction between and value of all of these: the value that lies in fixing something (even if it is repeatedly), the value that lies in accepting something as it is without fixing it and the value of replacing something that can no longer be fixed or accepted. Stamina, acceptance and tolerance, inventiveness and creativity as well as the ability to walk away from something, the ability to not tolerate everything, the wisdom to distinguish when something can be fixed and when something is, indeed, a lost cause.