Live in brokenness. Err repeatedly; tell everyone.
I’ve always lived in old houses. The house I live in now was built in 1927, and that’s later than the construction date of any other house I’ve ever lived in. (Of course, I keep aging, too, so the house I grew up in, though it was built in 1913, was only 63 years old when I moved in.) Old houses have problems. Sagging floors, wonky windows, roofs that need replacing, beams that need shoring up, wiring and pipes that need to be replaced. Best case scenario, you’re hoping for a Ship of Theseus where nothing matches because all the parts have been replaced at different times by different people. But old houses also have their charms: they are an entry point into a different world, with different standards and needs.
If you live in an old house, you know that nothing is ever really fixed. Problems are addressed enough that they fade into the background for a while. But there’s never enough time or money to maintain everything to the degree that it probably needs. And you know that no matter how fastidious you are in keeping up with routine stuff, something you didn’t even know about could reach a crisis state at any moment. And you just have to be okay with that. Some people can’t live in old houses, because they can’t accept that major systems could age out and collapse without warning. Of course, the joke is on them, because new houses aren’t really immune from similar problems; we’re all just one bad storm away from a flooded first floor, or something similar.
As I get older (and as I encounter more home maintenance problems), I realize that the whole world is just a bunch of old houses. Our economic system, our political system, our criminal justice system, our transportation, our farming, everything–it’s all just old plumbing ready to back up sewage into our “clean” kitchen. As a society we try to keep things patched up enough so that most people can pretend it’s okay enough, but we’ve had a lot of renovations by unlicensed contractors along the way.
I can try to contribute to working toward fixing whatever systems I can, but I have to live in the world the same way I live in an old house, knowing that everything is some level of broken or worn-out, that nothing will every truly be “fixed,” just jury rigged and painted over. “Good enough” is the watchword. Perfection is for people with more time and money than I’ll ever have.
I make mistakes. Sometimes costly ones: I once signed off on a book cover that had a significant typo, and had to be reprinted (a mid-four-figure mistake). Sometimes costly in other ways: I was running an event at my store and a homeless guy came in asking for money, interrupting things, and I berated him for it. I wish I had a do-over.
There have been times my mistakes have weighed on me so much that I’ve thought of myself as a bad person, spiraling into self-disgust. That’s a mistake of thinking itself, and once I got some help I learned to practice better mental habits.
The worst thing you can do with mistakes is to hide them, to pretend they never happened, to cover them up. Especially as a white man, I’ve been trained since birth that I can bullshit my way through anything. I can say something wrong that sounds plausible and get away with it. So I’ve had to retrain myself to normalize not knowing things, and being wrong about things. It used to take a terrible emotional toll to own up to having screwed up; it’s still not easy. But I understand that admitting my incredible fallibility is a good thing. Only by being vulnerable can I claim my humanity. Beware of people who are never wrong.
I can’t live in anger over every awful thing that people do. I’ve seen more disasters in my life than I expected to, and I’m starting to understand that this is the cost of living, and of being human. I’m going to see towers fall, and houses burn down, people cavorting unvaccinated and sewer lines back up, innocent people shot by police and roofs cave in. There are things I could have done to mitigate disaster, maybe, but when things are busy a little gurgle in the pipes doesn’t seem like a big deal until it’s too late. And then maybe I can do better next time, but I’m also just one person in a broken world. You try to fix what you can, when you can, but you also have to accept living in an old house, living amongst multiple systemic problems that can never truly be fixed, just patched up until next time. Because we’re all humans; we all make mistakes. And eventually enough mistakes and maintenance issues lead inevitably to disaster.