Repairing ourselves ? : By Santosh Desai

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.

 What unites all these responses is the absence of guarantees. And life gives us a lot to practise on. A bitter fight where words are said that cannot be taken back. A partner’s infidelity. A betrayal by a close friend. A breakup that comes without warning. A physical injury that changes everything. The untimely loss of a loved one. These are not experiences with a rewind button. Sometimes the best we can manage is accommodation. Finding a way to live around a fact that cannot be denied, repaired, or fully healed. It remains within us, surfacing at unexpected moments, demanding recognition.

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.

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