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I have been a big fan of Santosh Desai's writing - I think this specific piece is one of his finest ...
Things get broken. That is the natural order of life. Sometimes they erode gradually, invisibly, until one day they simply stop functioning. On other occasions, there is a sudden rupture, where something snaps. A rupture brings with it its own, unplanned clarity. Something gives way, and there is no going back. The script has suddenly been rewritten. Other forms of damage are slow seepages, barely visible until they have quietly rearranged the ground beneath our feet. Whatever the form, the fact of breakage is central to the human condition. We live in a world where endings happen whether or not we are prepared for them.
Our instinct, almost without exception, is to try and fix
things. To reclaim an earlier coherence. To treat the break as an interruption
rather than a turning. The urge to repair runs deep and carries with it a kind
of mechanical optimism: the belief that anything can be restored to its
original shape if we can only find the right tools, the right will. Our quarrel
with the idea of breakage lies in this assumption of reversibility. We imagine
that it is the duty of things to return to the way they once were.
If repair chases the illusion of the unbroken, healing
operates differently. It does not promise a return. It does not promise
completion. Repair isolates what went wrong and tries to correct or replace it.
Healing does not offer that comfort. The body intervenes when the wound heals;
it works with it. When it comes to healing, we need to trust the body’s and
mind’s own mechanisms. We need to surrender to time and to nature. A scar
appears when healing is complete; not as restoration but as a record. It is nature’s
way of making the broken permanent, or at least making memory of it part of
what survives. Healing is an organic recovery, not a correction. The crack does
not disappear so much as become livable.
This becomes most apparent in the emotional world, where
rupture cannot be reversed any more than time can be rewound. A breakup, for
instance, exposes us to a form of damage that has no solution. There is no
procedure that will stitch things back together; no method by which the earlier
sense of self can be reclaimed intact. When healing looks like mere resilience
— like the kind we like to celebrate — it is often a much quieter
reconstruction. A self-aware acceptance in its barest form. A self-awareness that
acknowledges the past rather than trying to bury it. The jagged and often
painful process of letting the self arrive at its own understanding, by
allowing it to feel what it must, to pass through what it needs to pass
through, without being hurried toward a newer or better version of itself.
Rehabilitation sits somewhere in between these two worlds.
It works not by restoring what was lost but by coaxing back function, by
building strength where weakness has taken hold. Rehabilitation accepts that
what was once natural and effortless must now be fought for. The body and the
mind have to relearn what they once knew, step by laborious step. It looks the
rupture in the eye and deals with its consequences. Here we claw our way back,
sometimes to a workable version of ourselves that bears only some resemblance
to the original.
The deepest discomfort may lie in the realization that in
many of these cases, there was never anything whole to begin with. That there
were always fine cracks that we papered over, that what we thought was solid
and stable was always an accident of circumstances. A marriage does not break
like glass breaks; it simply stops existing meaningfully in the present sense,
and we discover that what seemed permanent was always an arrangement made
viable by factors that were never constant. That things were always contingent,
and that reality was much slipperier than we gave it credit for in the first
place. The wound is not an instrument of rupture, but that of revelation. It
helps us find who we always were and exposes us to reality as it always was and
not as we wanted it to be. This is why accommodation feels more honest than
healing: we are not learning to live around damage to something solid, but
coming to terms with the provisional nature of what we mistook for permanence.
As our control over our lives increases, so does our
exposure to fragility. Our small deviations from expected trajectories feel
amplified because we are so used to having our own way. We have learned to
believe that the world must bend to our will, and when it refuses, we are
flabbergasted by the universe’s indifference to us.
