For three days, I have serviced, repaired, and immediately after watched a rotary disk mower-conditioner self-destruct. For three days, I read the manual, servicing all pieces shown, replacing all worn parts, aligned timing marks for disk rotations—all as the manuals instructed—and, on engaging and starting the mower once again, witnessed its immediate annihilation of self.
Something wasn’t right. Something was fundamentally wrong, but what?
After the third time, deconstructing the cutter bar and leaving its face bare, we examined everything again. The problem repeated, each time at the same point of failure. We looked at the problem more closely, externally before breaking everything apart.
There was one small difference. The last cog, while timing marks for proper spacing and rotation of cutter disks were correct on face alignment, the gear still appeared out of synch with the rest. Where all the others laid at the same resting angle, the point of failure showed an offset from the others—even with the timing markers reading correct. Could this be it?
We removed the gear cog—and the one next to it—checking internally for broken, worn, or missing teeth in the internal mechanics of the machine. There were none.
Before reassembling, and trying—one more time—to get the mower right, we made not of the offset of the cog before reassembling the machine. We installed the cog in alignment with all the others as they appeared on the cutter bar face.
We rebuilt the machine again: disks, blades, shields, and started the mower again.
Perfect.
No sound, no vibration, balance and perfect operation.
We returned to the hayfield, tried again, and the mower ran at speeds and smoothness I’ve never known it to have.
I don’t know how the cog was assembled wrong. My guess is that in a past repair, or examination of a problem, it was removed and—without attention—reassembled close, but not properly aligned; and ever-after, it has consumed blade edges and caused noise and vibration that, knowing no better, assumed was how the machine had always been.
Working on this mower—struggling and finding frustration in repeated-same repairs in accordance with a manual that immediately after proceeded to fail—made me think of the importance of timing an alignment; not just in mechanics, but in ourselves, life, and our societies as a whole?
How many times, in deconstruction of a perceived problem, do we reassemble a piece that was not the source nearly, but not precise, to the way it was. How many times, after, does this point of examination, after, become a persistent point of trouble, friction, destruction when everything according to what we read and see says it’s “right?”
The manual misses what our discernment first-hand should still see: something is off; and until that piece is fixed—brought back into alignment with the design as it was Created to be—it will always be a point of trouble and failures.
Maybe we too are made in a design, and when our alignment falls away from a Created Order, chaos, despair, and self-annihilation—personal and societal—is what is and must occur; and only when we return to alignment, is balance and stability restored.
I’ve lived through the experience of being off, out of alignment, grinding against my own will and perceived desires and aims, and felt the chaos of breaking one’s self apart by failures internal to my own soul-assembly.
I’ve also lived the reexamination, searching the small pieces, the details that are right by the book, but fundamentally wrong in assembly an employment, that—when corrected—restore an ease, smoothness to life, and balance in soul.
I perceive something is off in our present world. I believe we can do everything right by the economic, social, political books, and failures and societal-tribulations are still to come. I believe there is something in our culture fundamentally off, and few in positions of power are looking at the cause—for it is small and does not seek herald or self-advancement. It is a matter of alignment, how we arrange and order our selves in position to the greater mechanics of society and culture.
I worry because, like the mower, sometimes a small fix takes complete destruction of the machine for us to see how important one single tooth on cog—and its place in position with all the rest of a greater creation—can be.
Sometimes, the answer is not in the manual—not because the manual is wrong—but because something simpler is fundamentally wrong on which, without alignment to a standard beginning state, nothing after can amend.
Sometimes, the answer can only be found in discernment: understanding a system’s fundamentals and returning to a beginning standard that makes the rest work; and without such repair and return to alignment and order, there can only be destruction and failure.
What is off in our world? What have we deconstructed, examined in past as possible point of trouble and then restored, or replaced, on a fundamental societal level that we, perhaps, restored wrong? Where do we look? How do we fix it?
Our answer may be far simpler than the problems we perceive.