The Japanese concept of kaizen is something you have most likely come across. And I was reminded of it as I (once again) flipped through Exhausted by Anna Katharina Schaffner. If you have heard of kaizen, it’s probably used with reference to the “Toyota Way” which is when the company “deemed no improvement too small, regardless of how trivial it might seem.” If you’ve watched Ted Lasso, you might think of when Ted fixed things like the water pressure, when he first began as a coach. Schaffner says, “No less importantly, all improvements were implemented immediately.” It’s a philosophy of little by little, of “doing the next right thing.” Or as I’ve quoted before, via adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy book — Gibrán Rivera once asked, “What is the next most elegant step?”

It’s not lost on me that post-pandemic the world is awash in self-help types of books. I’ve found several of them to be very useful to me, as regular readers know. Instagram is teeming with folks sharing thoughts on how to live, (that age-old question), how to regulate our nervous systems, how to get through various cluster-f*cks, how to reimagine our relationship with work, with friends.

I like this following quotation:

“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

I’m enamoured with the language of small repair and I think that there’s instruction embedded in it from the “how-to” and right-to-repair world in how to live a life. I think of all the tiny repairs to my household just in the last year. I think of the still lifes I’ve made and used scotch tape and sticky tack to hold them in place. I think of the ways things fall into disrepair, that language, too: things fray, give up the ghost, they buckle, collapse, blow, crack, are torn, lose surface tension, become weathered, they fold, sour, unravel. They might fall (a cake, a bridge, a gate). There are kinds of repair: alterations, mending, rebuilding, filling, patching, re-wiring, re-jigging. We overhaul, darn, stitch, refurbish, fix, freshen. We can repair, and repair again.

I’m fond of repair that doesn’t try to hide the disrepair. I’m fond of repair that acknowledges and builds upon the disrepair. Like all the lego used to repair walls around the world. I’m fond of flowers in potholes.

I cannot thank those people often enough who make YouTube tutorials on every topic you can imagine. I’ve cleaned the sensor on my camera, fixed small things on my car, figured out what was wrong with my computer all thanks to these tutorials. I love watching the camera repair person on Instagram, or all the folks mending sweaters and knits and sharing their knowledge.

Sometimes, we just need to turn stuff off and back on again.

Making small repairs can be amusing or delightful, as in the case of lego or flowers. They might be funny or quirky. They might be almost invisible. Or they might be garish or utilitarian or a bit ugly-beautiful. And repairing and problem-solving can be empowering. When we repair something we might see the thing repaired as not just “good as new,” but different in interesting ways. Maybe we could look at a repaired or altered thing and it could spark new ideas for how things could be. New dreams could be dreamed and imagined. A repair can be a beginning or it could be ongoing. You might fix a thing over and over in one way before you come upon a different way of securing it. New material for stopping a gap might emerge or present itself.

When you fix something, you might ask for help. Here, hold this, you might say. Could you help with this, you say on the phone to a friend. A neighbour has a ladder, or a saw, or a can of nails. Can you give me a hand? There is a kind of magic that happens when you ask for help and receive it. When you ask for help you include someone else in making whatever thing work again, be useful again, fulfill its destiny.

Even a temporary fix, is a fix. A stop-gap measure is hopeful.

It’s not a bad thing to concentrate on small acts, right now, with the backdrop of looming elections, genocide, wars, famines, climate crises, personal afflictions, the various hardships of friends and loved ones.

It’s hard to keep calm. There’s a quotation by Hannah Arendt that I think helps, or at least gives us direction, instruction:

“Every deed and every new beginning falls into an already existing web, where it nevertheless somehow starts a new process that will affect many others even beyond those with whom the agent comes into direct contact….The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness and unpredictability; one deed, one gesture, one word may suffice to change every constellation.”

— Hannah Arendt

Keep working on the web, keep making small improvements. That’s probably all most of us usually have in our power to do. Who knows what making one thing a little more workable might do for this world?

All in the repair shop category.

October 29, 2024