Holes are forming in my favourite socks. They aren’t anything special – a black poly-cotton blend. But they are just the right length to cover the gap between my trousers and my boots, with the perfect amount of elasticity, staying up without pinching. I could try to darn them but why bother, when I can replace them with a few dollars and a click on a shopping app?
There is the planet to consider. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu might have considered mending my socks to be an act of resistance against the culture of fast-moving consumer goods; the environmental catastrophe of high capitalism. Repair cafes are springing up all over the world. At last count, there were almost 50,000 volunteers gathering in more than 3,000 global locations, offering to fix broken things and teach people like me how to do the same.
It’s also good practice for a zombie apocalypse. If, in the unlikely event that the undead invade, or the far more likely event of bushfires, I have my exit route planned. I will grab my family and head for the water, the irreplaceable photos I have not yet digitised ready in a suitcase under the house, along with a spare pair of glasses and a tiny screwdriver. Duct tape will be in short supply if civilisation crumbles.
But the ability to repair things can also be experienced as a spiritual practice. In almost all major religions, repair work is understood as a potential route of connection. Engaged in mindfully, and with the intention of doing good, this work can become a contemplative act, a bridge between the divine and the mundane.
The sociologist Robert Bellah believed that nobody could stand to live in the “real” world of everyday work all the time. The psychologist Abraham Maslow theorised that people fluctuate between “being cognition” and “deficit cognition” throughout the day, sensing infinitude and timelessness before plunging back into the daily scrabble of survival, and vice versa.
Repairing broken objects can become an experiential site for this shift, a practice in which the everyday struggle can meet the divine. In the Zen Buddhist practice of kintsugi, you take a broken bowl and stick the pieces back together. Do not try to hide the fracture but instead emphasise it, using gold or silver as the glue. Repair does not hide the object’s past, it integrates it into the object’s present.
This reminds me of grief. When my sister, father and mother died, I did not “get over” them. I integrated the knowledge of their absence into my body. Like a ceramic bowl with a golden fissure through its centre, I kept doing the job of living, but my loss became a part of me.
“Wabi-sabi” is a term which draws on the Japanese concepts of “wabi”, implying austerity and imperfection, and “sabi”, connoting the aloneness of human experience in the march of time. Instead of repairing an heirloom, like my dad’s favourite armchair, I might replace it with a piece of furniture which is so similar that it makes me do a double take. I have created a potential experience of loss every time I sit down. This, in turn, could repeatedly conjure in me an appreciation for what has been lost.
Which makes me think of Michelangelo’s mural on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. God stretches his hand towards the first man, Adam. Adam, infuriatingly, leaves his hand limp. The unbridged distance between their hands is symbolic of the source of all human longing. If Adam had just tried a little harder, maybe there would be nothing to repair. All would be perfect. But we would not exist.
The 16th-century Jewish mystic Isaac Luria told the story that God created the human world by exiling Himself from a part of His own absoluteness. The vessels which were supposed to hold His power shattered, scattering shards of divine light which created our reality. In the practice of tikkun olam, people “mend the world”, co-creating the harmonious universe intended by God.
Kintsugi, wabi-sabi and tikkun olam are all about repair, not restoration. But even modern contract law recognises the fundamental principle of physics: time cannot move backwards. To rescind a contract, I am supposed to restore my partner to the status quo prior to signing, a legal principle known as restitutio in integrum. I am permitted to offer substantial restitution. I cannot build a Tardis.
I will never be able to bring my mother, father, sister back. I cannot glue God’s vessels of lights together to create a perfect world. I cannot even get a ladder and graffiti Adam’s finger into contact. But I can mend my socks, which used to be my sister’s socks, ones I gave her because she always suffered from cold feet. I can stitch, and curse my inept fingers, and stitch a little more. I might slip into a daydream, lose track of time, at least until I stab myself with the needle. Then tomorrow, I can don socks that fit perfectly and when I wiggle my toes I will feel the scars of love.
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Jackie Bailey is the author of The Eulogy, winner of the 2023 NSW premier’s literary multicultural award. When she is not writing, Jackie works as a funeral celebrant, helping families navigate death and dying. This article draws on research for her forthcoming nonfiction book about spirituality for the non-religious
