March 13, 2023
Greetings from the tinkerer,
I have a long history of repairing things, with varying degrees of success. I have plumbed and sawed and hammered and tinkered and sanded and glued and cobbled and screwed and cussed my way through every kind of fixing you can picture.
I have tools, and I have experience, and when I am patient, I am often able to combine my poor skills with my second-rate tools, and make a broken thing better. I take a certain amount of pride when I succeed and can rationalize my failures with enough gusto to be proud of them too.
I love to mend something or to take something in poor condition and somehow add my tattered perspective and see it become something closer to its intended self. Not long ago I tinkered with an old piece of furniture. I looked and touched and wondered and imagined and it expressed its history and the others who had helped bring it to this day, and showed me its pain. It became a conversation of sorts, at the end of which we both were better for it.
Broken drawer. Unraveled rope. Scratched floor. Chipped counter. A door that won’t stay closed, a binding that won’t hold the page, a hole where there should be none or a place where a hole should be. Each experience, usually seasoned with time, helped create this thought:
Every broken thing has in it the potential to be made whole again.
When I was a young teenager I cut my finger with a sharp razor, a serious gash that perhaps in wiser times would have resulted in a trip to St. Joseph’s hospital. I remember that for a long time, it would not heal right, and during the winter it would crack again, and so it seemed I would always have this divot in my finger. And then, without me noticing, it just was healed.
The scar, like all of its sort, doesn’t pretend to be just as I was before, it has formed a new iteration of me, not better or worse, just whole again. I won’t pretend that I fixed the cut, that repair was put in me by the Creator before I was born. It advances my thought, though. In us, every broken thing has in it the potential to be made whole again.
Before you rush in with the exceptions, which I respect, allow me the space to believe first that all things broken can be made whole, because believing is almost always the beginning of it coming true.
Like all of us, I have made mistakes in my life, I have been disappointed, had my heart torn, and I have lost loved ones. These experiences, these broken places, seemed permanent, and while there will be scars, they ultimately mend. I’m writing this down to remind my future self of this truth.
Almost five years ago, my son Sawyer was hit by a car. It was not tragic, but tragedy was lurking in the wings. When we took him from the hospital, we were grateful he was alive, that he would have the chance to heal. But that was just the beginning of the process, the hopeful knowing that it would happen. There was still pain, and surgery, and disruption, and time.
I saw him yesterday, whole, healthy, not without change, not unmarked by any of what has happened in the last years, but proof of the potential.
When it comes to the human experience, healing, the way toward wholeness, can be a ragged path. Most of it, the repair, has to be allowed. Often, more often than we will sometimes admit, we need help, perhaps someone with tools or experience we don’t have, or haven’t used. We need time to be angry to grieve, to think, and sometimes just to let life unfold so that we can reach the day when the broken thing knits together.
Hemingway said: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” That strength is the roots of our experiences, wound around the fractures in our lives like gossamer strands of steel.
I have seen enough damage in my life to know that there are things waiting to happen to us that will not be fixed in this existence. We may have to wait until the time that is beyond this time. And still, the potential exists even if it is not where we wish to find it. As dark as that seems, let me assure you my message comes from light. Each day that brings us some fractured thing also brings us a way to mend it.
When I look at something I am tasked to fix, this cracked bit of wood, a latch that won’t, a hinge that complains, a nail that rebels against its purpose, I begin with believing that it can be repaired. I think of all of the broken things that have passed through my hands, through my heart, my prayers, my desires, and know that all of those things came with the potential to be made whole. Not always by me, not always in the time or manner that I would wish.
Keep your eyes open, your mind and heart open, be hopeful. The broken things, in your life and those you meet, come to us with the gift of healing already built into it. We just need to be willing to discover it.
Hope this finds you seeing the fix,
David
Copyright © 2023 David Smith
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