Today was a repair day. What I mean is that I spent the afternoon fixing things around the house, broken this-and-thats that have been crying out for my attention for quite some time (help us, help us!), but–you know–you’re not always in the mood to fix a leaky toilet. So you let it drip, drip, drip into the bowl. All day and all night, the water runs. Slowly, but it runs. Your utility bill goes up. A little, but it goes up.

One thing leads to another.

Along these lines, I didn’t MEAN to fix two lamps, a sink, and my parents’ leaky toilet today. I just got on a roll. I started with one lamp and kept thinking, Well, while I’m at it. One trip to Lowe’s and two trips to Walmart later, it was all done. No more lamps with faulty sockets. No more leaky toilet or kitchen sink.

Now we can see, pee, and clean debris (from our plates).

After I finished fixing one of the lamps today, my mom expressed her gratitude by telling me a story, about our friend Randy who used to travel once a year from Baltimore to visit his parents in Arkansas (he doesn’t anymore because both he and his parents are dead). “Randy said each year he’d find more and more things in his parents’ home in disrepair,” Mom said. “As you get older, you just can’t keep up with everything that breaks. Take that lamp you just fixed, for example. If it weren’t for you, we never would have used it again.” And whereas I appreciate my mom’s appreciation and am happy to put things back together, what I’ve been thinking about this evening is the fact that everything, by design, falls apart. Even if you take care of your stuff and have a live-in handyman, sooner or later all material objects (and people) go the way of the dinosaurs.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t take care of your shit or patch the holes in your jackets. You should. I’m just saying, you’re fighting a losing battle.

One thing that occurred to me tonight is that just like our physical things eventually dissolve or pass away, so do our mental stories and emotional states. Who hasn’t had the experience of being totally pissed off one day and waking up the next day (or week) completely fine? Looking back, you think, What was I so upset about? Well, where did you bad mood go? Down the toilet, that’s where.

All bad moods pass away.

Unless–and perk up here because this is my major point–we keep “fixing” them. What I mean is that if you’ve been carrying a resentment or holding a grudge for one, two, or thirty years, it’s only because you’ve been “repairing” it, nursing it back to life every time it starts to die. Once I had a dear woman tell me that for decades she’d be laying one particular concern at the feet of the cross. I didn’t say it at the time, but I thought, Why do you keep picking it back up?! Of course, I do this too, not only with my judgments about other people (and they did this, and this, and this), but also with my judgments about myself and what’s possible in my life. I think, I’ll always be this (too sick too poor) because I always have been. And yet that’s just a story I’ve told myself over and over again, a fairy tale that would gladly slip out of my hands if I’d let it, a fable that would naturally fall apart if I’d only stop putting it back together.