Mending

I call myself a mending activist and yet I have never mended like this before. I’ll come clean and admit that I have hardly ever mended anything at all. There is no need, and try as I might even I can’t find the incentive or the time. I inspire others to mend but can’t defeat my own apathy as a victim of material abundance. I made a zero consumption pledge in 2008 to wear nothing but the clothes that I already owned for the rest of my life, but it failed to make a mender of me. By then, my hoard far exceeded what I can physically wear out in my own lifetime. The mending pile keeps growing, but I still have plenty of wearable clothes left in the wardrobe. Mending is always postponed. To become a mender, more drastic measures were required. I had to make mending irresistible and unavoidable. And so it was that I set out for Cuba in the spirit of a pioneer mending tourist, with a suitcase of unwearable clothing in need of repair and a pledge to mend every last thing by my return a month later.