Mid-faith Crisis 311: Go slow and repair things

After a brief debate about which of us is the more miserable, we discuss whether social media can help us engage with our shadow, detaching from the news without feeling guilty, and how hate actually tethers us to the object of our hatred. Also we have a discussion about Advent.

This year I’m thinking a lot about the need to focus on small things. Advent is part of that. The nativity accounts seem quite big and spectacular, what with exotic magi, strange stars and deranged rulers. But actually the event itself is quite small: just a birth in a peasant household, witnessed by a handful of people. Nobody at the time noticed it very much.

We live in a world dominated by big, startling, worrying events. And that can make us feel as though that is the reality. But I believe that these things are outweighed every day by the ordinary acts of love and hope, which are so small that we barely notice them. Hope is the dark matter of the universe.

So what can we do? I was struck by this excellent essay by Tish Harrison Warren, Go Slow and Repair Things. The Silicon Valley mantra, ‘Move Fast and Break things’ seems exciting and flashy, it screams ‘action’ and ‘change’. But it’s the everyday slow actions of repair and restoration that make a difference to the world. It’s not enough to break things: you have to patiently rebuild. And this is something that we can all be a part of.

Repair is not fashionable. The market prefers planned obsolescence. It sells us headphones with non-replaceable batteries and wafer-thin laptops and household devices which depend on software updates.¹ There is another way. This excellent article on how tech is designed to fail talks about the Japanese concept of mottainai, which emphasises the need to treasure resources and repair and reuse, rather than discard.

For me, this feels very important. And not just because I live in a very old house and drive a very old car. This week both have caused me problems. But perhaps I should view them as symbolic. Keeping them both going is an act of defiance. It takes time. It is inconvenient at times. But that is what it means to go slow and repair things.

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