A Cracked Phone

 Today seemed to be a bad luck day for me, as I had neglected to take my cellphone with me this morning. I went back home to retrieve it (which cost me a bit of time) only to find later that night that it slipped from my hand and cracked on the pavement. I now regret the fact that I went back to retrieve the phone: a phone safe at home is much better than one freshly cracked! Nonetheless, my first impulse upon breaking the phone was to protect the phone by buying a case, which is something I should have thought of before cracking the phone! Now why would I have such a protective impulse, I wonder, after doing such a thing?
   There is indeed something interesting about the desire to nurse something that is broken. Maybe it is a natural kind of instinct, but an alternate explanation is that the cellphone has become an extension of my own body and being. It makes sense that this would be so, because now our phones have become such faithful extensions of ourselves: providing the daily news, the facebook feeds, and the connections with the outside world that we crave. To break a phone is to disrupt something that seems so vital. So there is actually a sense of developing an attachment and treating it as an extension of one's own awareness and well being.
    But once something is broken, one cannot go back to the way it was before. Either it gets repaired somehow or I will suffer a couple of years until it is replaced. But once it has happened, I can only accept its brokenness as symbolic of my own brokenness, and resolve to be more mindful in the future. It would make no sense for me to go back in time to a moment when it wasn't cracked at all, but at the same time, it is important to learn something from it and develop a resolve not to repeat the mistakes that triggered it to happen.For instance, do I really need to pull out my cellphone on a street corner, when it can be accidentally dropped?  These are times when I am tested to see if I can truly be meditative about my actions, and not driven so much by anxiety.