Fix Versus Toss

Last week I decided to fix something instead of toss it—even though tossing it would have saved me time. The experience stirred something within me.

My sleeping bag zipper broke. I woke up cold one night while camping and pulled up on the zipper to create a little cocoon around me. It didn’t budge. I pushed instead, but still nothing. I pulled up even harder. No movement. Then harder still.

No surprise. It broke.

The next morning, I fiddled with it and had no luck with repairing it. When I got home, I tinkered some more, had a fit of rage or two, and still no luck. I was standing in my garage with the bag in my hands and looked over at the garbage bin. Do I just toss it and be done with it? I did some quick math in my head and figured that replacing it wouldn’t cost much.

But then I paused and examined the bag in my hands. I liked this sleeping bag. The down was still fluffy. The orange in all its shades was cheerful. The bag just had a good feel to it.

No, I’m going to see if I can get it fixed.

So I started searching for a place to fix it. Tailors at dry cleaners were my first calls, but they couldn’t help—or charged too much. Just before giving up, I came across a business name in my Google search: Vic’s Shoe & Luggage Repair. Huh. If he can fix shoes and luggage … maybe he can fix a zipper.

When I walked into his tiny storefront, the aroma of leather and oil filled the air. Ohhh, yeah, that’s what I want to smell when I come into a repair shop. Vic came out wearing old-school oilskin coveralls with hand tools tucked into the pockets. Ohhh, this is good … I think I’m going to like this guy. He grabbed my bag, put on his glasses, studied the zipper with his rough hands and nimble fingers, commented on its two-way function, and fiddled with it some more. I could tell my bag was in the hands of a fixer.

“Yes. I can fix. $20,” he said in his thick accent. Three days later I picked it up.

Over the following few days, I noticed a low-grade good feeling that lingered within me. I was glad I had fixed my bag. I felt good that I hadn’t marched over to the bin and hurled it inside. There was something faint stirring within me.

Was it that I had saved some money by not replacing the bag? No. I can afford another bag. I would just wait until REI has another fabulous sale and purchase to my heart’s content. Heck, maybe I’d buy two.

Was it that I had kept another item out of the landfill? Nope. As much as I care about needless trash, that wasn’t it.

It was something else.

Here’s what I’ve come to: it felt good to refurbish.

Yes. I know. Life-altering. Insights like this don’t come in many weekly essays. Ha!

But seriously, it just felt good to take an item I liked and make it useful again. Save it. Resurrect it. It just felt like a good act.

I know this is such a small, simple thing—and in a way not a thing at all.

But no! It is a thing. It is an act. It is an act that is counter to the rugged buy, buy, buy that feels like my life. This was an act of save, save, save.

And that feels good sometimes. It’s good to tinker and fiddle and fidget with something that brings us joy. Maybe that’s a little of what crocheters feel as they work with their fingers. Maybe that’s what my wife, Joyce, feels when she finds that perfect second-hand item at a thrift store. Maybe that’s what you feel when you mend your own shirt with a needle and thread.

There is something about refurbishing that is healthy. There is something about tinkering that is good for us. There is something good about stepping off the buy, buy, buy escalator that can make us feel a bit more grounded.

Two months from now, I’ll be in my campervan parked at ten-thousand feet in the Sierra Nevada mountains. As the temperatures drop, I will immerse myself into a sleeping bag of various shades of orange, fluffy in its bearing, snuggly in its mummy-form, having a zipper which moves nicely up and down the bag. And as the temperatures drop into the teens, I will reach for that zipper and close the mummy circle, my head enclosed nicely. And I will have the passing, sleepy thought of, “I love this bag. I’m so glad I fixed it.”