How To Fix A Broken Shoelace

A story about self-reliance

So the other morning I’m pulling on my sneakers, giving the laces a tug, and one of them snaps in two. It’s 7am and the frustration piles up.

First, I’m mad at the shoelace for not doing its job—but, alright, things break sometimes—so then I’m mad at myself because I want to throw the damn shoes away, broken laces and all, instead of fixing the problem—and, finally, not wanting to own such a ridiculous reaction, I’m mad at our culture for conditioning me to make trash out of perfectly fixable things.

Ah, victimhood. Absolution’s finest vintage.

I fish out my old boots from the bin and think back on this pasture gate I once fixed while working as a hand on a cattle ranch in southern Colorado. I had tied the thing up with some baling twine—a temporary fix, no question—when another wrangler came up and said, “when a cowboy fixes things, he fixes them right.”

Maybe a little trite, but I never forgot it. So, like a real cowboy, I eventually went onto Amazon and bought a new pair of laces for my sneakers. And since the color doesn’t really match, now the shoes have a little more character than before, to put it kindly—they’ll never be the same.

Some might say signs of mending and repair detract from an object, but I think it’s proof that a thing has done good work, good enough work that someone has decided it’s worth the effort to patch and keep going. We don’t need to hide our flaws, do we?

There is a Japanese art form called Kintsugi, or “golden joinery.” In this tradition of fixing broken pottery, a craftsman uses a special lacquer mixed with precious metal. Instead of hiding the cracks, they’re celebrated—inseparable from the object, scars are made beautiful.

Although patches, golden or otherwise, assumes our ability to fix something in the first place, along with the desire to do so. That’s not really what our society is all about anymore. For instance, we have cars in which you cannot check the oil, even if you wanted to. Self-reliance has been obliterated in the name of reliability. How’s that for some capitalistic prophecy.

Maybe this has always been the case. Back in 1841, in his essay on Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “the civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.”

To think of what more we’ve lost since then.

You could probably make a decent assessment of how lacking in self-reliance we are as individuals by the amount of companies exploiting the deficiency. Like if you can’t cook, DoorDash it; if you can’t put an IKEA cabinet together, TaskRabbit shows up—and then maybe you get upset at paying for something you could have done yourself.

Don’t get me wrong: it sometimes makes more sense to pay people to do things that you can’t or won’t do. But I also think it’s generally worth knowing how to do things, anyway. For the sake of competency, if not quality control.

Except we don’t have to know things anymore. Everything we need to know is on the internet. We’ve outsourced this information / knowledge / experience from our heads to the web, and with it our sense of being informed. Call it convenience, call it willful ignorance—tomato tomahto—I include myself in this indictment.

But I think a pushback is coming.

I’ve been reading about this idea of the New Romanticism, particularly the writing of

Ted Gioia

. The original Romantics in the 1800s were largely pushing away from the mechanization of the Industrial Revolution, the scientific rationalization of nearly everything, for the sake of feeling and emotion. The New Romantics, right now, are pushing away from the automation of the Technological Revolution, the algorithmic infantilization of our lives, for things more organically conceived and humanistically connected.

I say good riddance. Technology will not save us. We can only save ourselves—which means, first, exhibiting a little more self-reliance.

To paraphrase Emerson once more: for the self-helping man, all doors are flung wide, all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it.

So much awaits us in that future. But, if nothing else, a self-helping man can at least get himself a new pair of shoelaces.

-Martin