In a flowerbed beside a city street, a grey bicycle leans against the trunk of a tree. Hydrangeas bloom around it, violet and pink, and behind it runs a quiet road lined with a cream-coloured façade and arched windows. The sun is low, and the wheels cast long shadows across the earth. At first glance it looks like a bicycle someone has parked. Then you come closer.
The rear tyre has slipped off the rim and hangs to one side, a limp black loop lying in the dirt. The front wheel is buckled. The mudguard has a patch of rust, the frame is furred with dust, the grips are worn until their colour has gone. Nobody has ridden it in a long time. Someone leaned it there one day, perhaps meaning to come back for it, and never did.
And yet, if you look closely, it is not wrecked. It has simply stopped.
An hour’s work
Any cyclist could tell you what it needs. A new inner tube. The tyre seated back on the rim. A wheel trued, spoke by spoke, until it spins straight again. A drop of oil on the chain, a cloth over the frame. An hour’s work, perhaps, and a few francs in parts.
The bicycle, after all, is one of the most repairable objects there is. It is made of simple parts, all on view, almost all of them standard. A tube bought today will still fit a rim from fifty years ago. There are no secrets, no special screws, no software or codes. Anyone who had a father, a grandfather or a patient neighbour has seen a wheel taken apart on newspaper spread across the floor, the tube dipped in a basin of water to find the puncture.
That is the detail that makes the scene so exact. The bicycle was not abandoned because it could not be repaired. It was abandoned because, at some point, repairing it seemed less convenient than leaving it there. The fault was small. The decision, or the absence of one, was large.
It happens far more often than we admit. Most of what we let go is not broken beyond saving. It is broken just enough to ask something of us. And the effort, nearly always, loses to the alternative.
The economics of replacement
We live inside a system built to make that alternative the sensible one. When something fails, the sum is quick: the cost of repair against the cost of new, the time it would take against the ease of buying. Most of the time new wins, and not because we are shallow. Spare parts are hard to find, repair shops have closed, and objects are designed to stay shut rather than be opened.
It was not always this way. Two or three generations ago every town had its cobbler and its tailor, the knife grinder, the man who re-caned chairs and the one who mended umbrellas. Repair was not a matter of principle. It was simply what people did, because things were expensive compared with the labour it took to keep them going. Today the ratio has flipped: labour is dear and things are cheap. And when those trades disappeared, a habit of mind went with them, the instinct to ask “can this be fixed?” before asking “where can I buy another?”
The numbers give a sense of scale. According to the United Nations’ Global E-waste Monitor, published in 2024, the world produced 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022, 82 per cent more than in 2010. Less than a quarter, 22.3 per cent, was formally documented as collected and recycled. Waste, the report says, is growing five times faster than recycling.
Something is slowly beginning to shift. In 2024 the European Union adopted Directive 2024/1799 on the right to repair, which member states were required to transpose by 31 July 2026. For certain products, among them washing machines, fridges and phones, it obliges manufacturers to offer repairs at a reasonable price and to make spare parts available. And anyone who chooses to have a product repaired under guarantee rather than replaced gets an extra year of cover.
It is a law about appliances. But it also says something broader: that a return to repair takes more than good intentions. Someone has to make the choice possible again.
An afternoon in Amsterdam
On 18 October 2009, in a small theatre in Amsterdam-West, the Dutch journalist Martine Postma organised an unusual afternoon. She asked her neighbours to bring in the broken things they had stored in the cellar, and a few volunteers with clever hands to help mend them. Toasters, lamps, chairs, jumpers with holes, bicycles. She called it a Repair Café.
The idea was almost naively simple. It worked. By October 2025 there were more than 3,800 Repair Cafés around the world, from Dutch villages to American cities, Switzerland included. Each time, the same thing happens: someone arrives certain the object is finished, and discovers that it needed a screw, a soldered wire, a new belt.
But people who run these events say the most interesting part is not the repair rate. It is people’s faces when the thing works again. It is not only relief at the money saved. It is the surprise of getting back something they thought was lost, and with it a small embarrassment at having nearly thrown it away.
In those moments, repair stops being a technical act. It becomes a way of seeing things: not as goods that expire, but as presences that can go on.
Gold in the cracks
In Japan there is a way of mending broken ceramics called kintsugi. The pieces are joined with urushi lacquer, and the lines of the break are dusted with powdered gold. The crack is not hidden. It is brought into view.
One of the stories about its origin concerns the shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, at the end of the fifteenth century. He is said to have broken a Chinese tea bowl he treasured and sent it back to China for repair. It came back held together by heavy metal staples, sound but ugly. Japanese craftsmen, unsatisfied, are then supposed to have looked for a way of mending it that did not diminish it.
Whether or not the story is true, the idea inside it is precise. A repaired thing is not a lesser version of what it was. It carries its own breaking with it, and the decision not to let that be the end. The gold is not there to pretend the damage never happened. It is there to say that someone thought the bowl was worth keeping.
What repair teaches
In 2014 the American scholar Steven Jackson, of Cornell University, published an essay called Rethinking Repair. He proposed looking at the world not from the starting point of innovation but from breakdown: from the things that fail, wear out and stop working, and from the people who put them right every day. He called it “broken world thinking”.
His argument was that breakdown is not only an ending. It is a moment that produces knowledge. Whoever repairs a thing knows how it really works, because they have seen it opened up and understood where it gives and why. Often they know more than the person who designed it. The mechanic who has changed a hundred inner tubes recognises at a glance a wheel about to go. The technician who has opened a thousand washing machines knows which part will fail first. It is a knowledge made of attention, born exactly where things stop working.
The idea reaches well beyond objects.
A career goes through periods when something breaks: a failed project, the wrong role, a year of doubt that seems to have no end. At those moments the culture of work tends to offer a single answer: change, start again, look elsewhere. Sometimes that is right. But often the fault is smaller than it looks, like a tyre slipped off its rim. And the person who stops to understand where it gave way, instead of leaving, learns something that those who always move on never learn.
The same is true of organisations. When a team runs into trouble, the instinct is to replace: new people, new methods, a fresh start. But a team that has been through a serious difficulty together knows where its cracks are, which relationships hold under pressure and which do not. It is knowledge that appears in no report, and it is lost every time we choose to start over rather than repair.
Even relationships follow this logic. The ones that last are not the ones that never cracked. They are the ones where someone, at the moment of the crack, decided it was worth staying.
The sum we never do
At this journal, Calm Performance is our name for a way of working and living that judges performance partly by what it manages to preserve. Constant replacement looks efficient, but it carries a cost we rarely count: each time, we lose what a thing, a person or a group had built up. The history, the knowledge, the familiarity. Repair costs effort now, but it keeps all of that.
A few simple choices follow. The first: when something fails, ask how large the damage is before asking how much a new one would cost. The second: learn to repair at least a few things with your own hands, because people who can do it look at objects differently. The third: take the same question into your work. The project that has stalled, the collaboration that has cooled, the client with whom something went wrong are not always things to replace. Sometimes an hour of careful work is enough.
And a fourth: accept that the repair will show. A mended thing never goes back to exactly what it was. That is fine. The trace of the repair is precisely what tells you someone cared.
The missing decision
Back to the bicycle under the tree. The hydrangeas will go on flowering for a few more weeks, then lose their colour. The light will change with the season. The bicycle will stay where it is, its tyre hanging and its wheel buckled, until someone decides something: to take it away, or to fix it.
It does not need much. It needs someone to look at it and think it is worth the trouble.
Perhaps that is the most honest question we can ask of an object, a piece of work, an organisation, anything we have put part of ourselves into. Not whether it is broken. Almost everything, sooner or later, breaks.
The question is whether it is worth repairing. And in answering it, we discover not only what we value. We discover who we are.
