I find I do my best philosophizing in the shower and during long drives on the I25. I was driving home with my partner this evening when a strange contradiction floated to the front of my mind.

“A patch on a well-traveled backpack or stitches on a well-loved sweater are cute, but a patched wall or boarded-up window make me uneasy”

I know I’m not the only one who feels disquieted around holes in walls and broken windows. The broken windows theory is a well observed phenomenon.

Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one un-repaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)

What struck me about backpacks and sweaters, was that visible repairs are a celebration of the their history.