Broken is just a concept that leads to fixing

My kids broke a bunch of glasses yesterday. It was a mess that resulted in much beauty coming through.

"Broken" is inherently a judgement. When we invoke the idea of something being "broken" we are naturally inspired to fix. This is the way of the Dao, everything exists in pairing with its opposite.

The word "fix" is a fascinating one:

I need to fix myself.

I'm fixated on this outcome.

He's taking a fixed position.

My dog got fixed.

Giuliani is Trump's chief fixer.

At first these uses seem random and non-connected, but there is a coherent theme. Fixing is keeping a certain state or idea in place, immovable, unchanging, stagnant. Keeping my body just as it was yesterday. Keeping my dog in a perpetual pre-adolescent state, away from the variability of hormones. Being immovable in what you will accept from others. Making sure a certain outcome will occur, regardless of the moral cost (thanks Giuliani).

This all reminds me of the Lego Movie where the father of the main character (played by Will Ferrell) wants to superglue all of the legos together, to fix them in place so that his creation can never be destroyed. In Legoland, just as it is in our "real" world, being superglued is akin to death. Life has to move and change. When something is fixed, it is essentially not living. It follows that fixing can be particularly counterproductive when one is in the business of transformation and evolution.

In qigong practice, we are reminded to be aware of fixations: fixed mindsets, being attached or fixed on a particular experience or to a particular outcome, being fixed on what happened in the past, or being fixed on worrying about the future. It's a bit of a paradox because having an intention can be beautiful and healing, but even a healing intention can become a poison pill if one is too fixed to it. When Buddah said that desire leads to suffering, he was essentially talking about fixation. It's the immovability to the rising tides that leads some to drown rather than to let go and float with the current.

The impulse to fix directly follows the judgement of "broken". What if we played with gently reprogramming ourselves away from defaulting to this pattern? Can we believe that there was truly never anything wrong with us? Can we believe this with all of our heart, regardless of what any parent, boss, doctor, magazine, or well meaning friend has said? Can we believe that we are, and have always been whole and perfect? Can we playfully remove the concept of "broken" by replacing it with the knowing that we are constantly changing, transforming, and alive? Can we extend this practice further to the people, organizations, and systems outside of ourselves? How do these changes in perspective help us see truths and possibilities that weren't available to us in the old broken/fixed mindset?

A glass cup falls to the floor and shatters. Is it broken or is it on a journey of evolution to a new state? If left to natural forces, that glass would be worked on by the earth's environment. It would become thousands of tiny pieces and eventually, with the movement of time and hydrogeologic forces, become beach sand. A glass cup becomes a beach, what a miraculous transformation! From this perspective, was the glass ever truly "broken"? Perhaps not from the perspective of the glass.

Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with fixing something, it can be a beautiful service to ourselves and our community. It's can be useful to see, however, how an unconscious "fixing" impulse could be keeping us stuck in the very place we are so desperately trying to get out of.