If I had to pick a word of the year for 2022, knowing what I do now about the past 12 months, it would be “embodiment.”
I have not lost myself in parenthood as I feared I might, and yet everything — even the way my brain functions — has changed. Through it all, one of the best practices I have done (and can do) for my physical and mental wellness is to trust the wisdom of my body.
This can look like:
As Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, “Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.”
My 36-year-old body, one that has been shaped and reshaped by life and childbearing and stress and personal growth, can better receive the benefits of movement and nourishment than it could at age 15 or 27.
Lately, I’ve been wondering what it would mean to apply this framework to my home and belongings. I often think about making decisions based on my values through a lens of environmentalism or anti-capitalism or social responsibility, for example, attempting to repair an appliance instead of immediately buying a new one. But what if, say, mending a hole in a sock could benefit my nervous system as well as the planet?
I’m reminded of the Japanese practice of kintsugi, in which cracks in a piece of pottery are repaired by being filled with powdered gold. The mending emphasizes the flaws rather than camouflaging them, adding beauty to the brokenness.
Artist Molly Martin says this about repair (in her case, mending clothing) as an act of care and a reflection on the self:
We carry the knocks of life on our bodies, like an old, much-loved and patched-up pair of trousers. Our wrinkles are a sign of time, of weather and of life. Old age is inescapable, but if we are honest about it, there can be grace and beauty in it. Surely, we can see that this must be so, and when we try to deny it by avoiding old things that are worn, rather than learning to love them, we somehow deny our own reality.
This is the sense of care and intentionality I am trying to live out as life continues to pick up speed and blurs the memories of simplicity imposed by lockdowns and social distancing.
(I keep chanting to myself a new spin on the 90s-era PSA: “Mend, heal, repair.”)
One reply on “Repair as an act of self-care”
Part of maturing is knowing what help you need; and the humility to ask for it. Take consolation when things can be repaired. Being twice this “repairer’s” age, I am in the mode of “salvaging” what I can: joints, discs, humor, patience (the most fragile of all), and memories. I feel like I am losing the beads of life’s rosary but still making the stations. Nature knows what it’s like, and God speaks to me through her. Friends and virtue and a thousand beauties all around and so much still to explore and know and share (or not) give orders to a pulse. So much of life is vulnerability and needs a saving hand. The end of that extension doesn’t care what the hand looks like. God speaks to me like a heel touches pathways.