I had other plans for this morning and for this post, but when I went to fry an egg for breakfast I found that somehow, without noticing it, last night I sealed the cast iron skillet to the ceramic cooktop with a bit of unnoticed plastic. An hour and a half of baking soda, utility knife blades, and elbow grease later, here I am. The skillet’s in the oven, burning off the residue I couldn’t get off any other way; I have no idea whether this is a good idea, and suspect it’s not for the sheer fumes of it all, but I don’t have a “burn pit” which was the other piece of advice I found on the internet1, so here we are. I have the fan on and the windows in the kitchen open, but that’s fine because it’s in the low 40s outside and the heating system was getting a bit complacent.

It’s amazing the amount of time and effort required to make up for a bit of carelessness. Another way to think about it, I suppose, is that when you care about things, you take care of them—care is a process, not an affect. “Things” are, or can be, relationships. A beloved sweater. A board game you’ve played many times with friends. A pan you bought for $25 at a hardware store when you were really on your own for the first time, and proceeded to let cover itself with rust in the pantry for eight years because you were young and didn’t know how to care for it, but which you rediscovered in your thirties and spent days scouring the rust off, applying coats of seasoning. You can fail a pan, and fix it, and fix it again when you fail it again.

On thing we can do against that moment when “all that is solid melts into air,” is to not let it. Fix the thing that seems broken. Form and build the bonds that seem so fragile and so easily torn away. Maybe you can’t walk forever into the wind of change—but each step does matter, and if you can’t imagine even taking a step, at least you can try. Every time I have tried, it has led me to be more careful about admitting into my life those things which can be fixed, which reward the effort, even when the fix isn’t one of those magical kintsugi scenarios where the end result is more beautiful than the original—even when the fix is jank and a bit slapdash and won’t be anyone’s featured After picture. The Buddha’s right, I think, that all things are transient and empty of inherent fixed being and that the root of suffering can be found in clinging to impermanent things as if they were permanent, but when he says all he really means it, he’s talking about us. You, me, the cast iron pan, the world, we’re all in this together. If the perfect state is impermanent, unfixed—that must apply to the broken state as well. The mess is a gateway to the work, the practice, and at the end of the day, the practice is what we have.