“Everyone likes to stay when it's the better. But staying through the worse—
that's the whole point of the vow, for Christ's sake.”
–Kurt Armstrong
After futzing with a suboptimal situation (a job, relationship, a broken kettle), you may want to chuck the whole thing out. Start anew. Here’s another path. Instead of reject and replace, you can repair and remain.
The path of repair was once quite popular. It used to be unthinkable to toss out a malfunctioning kettle, let alone your career, your spouse, or “the system, man.” You tried to make things work, because you didn’t have much of a choice.
In this post-scarcity world, you can oust anything the moment it falters. A shiny replacement is only a few swipes away. But when you rush to replace, you miss out on the road less travelled by. The journey and practice of repair.
Repair tests resilience because your first attempts will fail. (Murder your first born ideas.) Repair reveals the nuances you don't see when you repeatedly start from scratch. Repair demands curiosity, because what you think is broken may not be what's broken. (Certainty is a feeling not a fact.) Repairs burdens you with the truth that nothing is perfect.
All of these tests train the lost art of mercy.
Why bother? Because repair makes you better too. It widens your aperature to see something broken as having potential and worth. When you undertake repair, you become a conduit that connects the errors of history with infinite possibility.
It is to invoke the spirit of creation long after genesis. Repair is the way home again.