The Magic of Broken Things
There goes the neighborhood
Since December of 2023 I’ve had several things materially break.
Thus far, they are:
Car battery
Two tires on the car that had a battery failure
Living room television
Incline strut on treadmill (also caused the treadmill itself to break)
At least one tire on another car (pending more detailed diagnostics)
An inkjet printer
My iPhone 13 Pro, which had a shattered back from a battery swell and some unknown previous impact damage.
This is a non-trivial amount of things to break, and also a non-trivial cost to replace or repair them. Kind of.
Car battery was replaced under warranty
Tires (paid for)
Living room television (replaced with gift certificate money, the experience itself an entire odyssey)
Treadmill breaking (paid for a repair, now operational but no incline working)
Inkjet printer replaced (had an old laser printer with some spare toner)
iPhone replaced (waiting for replacement under AppleCare)
With all the things that had been broken, there was a running joke that perhaps I have been hexed in some way. Mercury in retrograde and whatnot. Statistical anomaly, or perhaps just plain bad luck. Whatever the case is, something that was working, stopped working.
With each successive thing that broke, I examined what needed to be done and made decisions about the thing. Money, time, and attention leaked from my various pores and crevices. However, I was not frustrated or sent into a spiral of despair.
With each thing that broke I became more grateful in the transience of things. Each thing that broke taught me more about my relationship with the world, and the over-reliance on things for breaking, and the interesting situations I find myself in.
Whatever mystical forces out there are working to selectively break things around me by malicious chance or otherwise, I choose to view these things with a sense of fun and wonder. Each of these things which broke have, ultimately, shown me more aspects of the world and myself.
As I write this, I currently have no phone. The many distractions of the handheld misery lightning device are far away, waiting dutifully for their next replacement. I have become aware of my relationship cycles with using the phone and where it has lingered, close to my bedside with a battery waiting to explode and an alarm that jolts me awake with a too-loud morning jingle that I never got around to fixing. Its absence means work cannot contact me for an emergency, no others can contact me save through other means and channels that are far less frequent.
The cars having issues remind me that there are things that are hidden which may surface and require some additional self-reliance. This is probably one of the last times this year I intend to take the vehicles in for service at a shop to be charged hundreds of dollars per visit. Learning how to perform basic maintenance tasks safely and at home on the car like replacing a battery, air filters, using a patch kit on a tire with a leak, and so on will become part of my routine.
The television breaking had subtle but profound relationship changes with the way I interact with my parents, particularly my dad, who sometimes sits there watching the kind of content mix that runs the gamut from politically biased news outlets to videos of dump trucks in Southeast Asia to street food videos from around the world. He’s found a way of keeping himself busy with projects in the workshop in between bouts of using a smaller television for a time.
Of course, there are many other nuances that happen when things break:
'One day Ajahn Chah held up a beautiful Chinese tea cup, “To me this cup is already broken. Because I know its fate, I can enjoy it fully here and now. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.” When we understand the truth of uncertainty and relax, we become free. -- version by Jack Kornfield (from The Wise Heart), referenced from https://www.stevenkharper.com/thiscupIsalreadybroken.html
In times of uncertainty, there is always a desire for more security borne out of the fear of change. As things continue to break (and I’m sure there are more things just waiting for their time to break) I have mostly just learned to embrace the situation, even if it’s difficult and a struggle, and figure out where to go from there.
Unga bunga.