Synthesize Anew

I am an analytical sort, really. Show me a problem and I'll start picking away at it a piece at a time. I'll ask questions—who what, where, when—and pile up the answers somewhere. Show me something too big to take in and I'll try taking it apart. What does this piece do? What happens if you take it off? My son caught a little of that from me. He took the first bike we bought for him completely apart. He also inherited my mechanical skills, since that bike was never the same. But show me something broken in pieces and I'll try putting it back together. Think about the "I can fix that" urge that men seem to have, irrespective of how much or how little talent we possess in that department. Is that synthesis? I'm thinking it only becomes synthesis when there is something new added to the mix. So just trying to put it back together is just a transitional stage, maybe even a subtle form of re-analyzing something. It becomes synthesis only with the addition, the newness.
I was comparing notes with a friend of mine about some things in life that had really come apart (secretly focusing on my own stuff, I guess). It has made me think about how something new must enter the equation to make a change. And change is necessary—what has come apart has come apart for a reason. If you simply put it back together just the same, it can be expected to come apart again, right? So, yes, change is needed. Besides that, things usually don't come apart unless some new event or information comes into play.
That doesn't mean we don't need to know how things (our lives, our relationships, our vision of ourselves) went together in the first place. We won't know how it has changed if we don't understand how it worked before. But another piece of synthesis involves taking diverse elements and putting them together in a new way. Logically, that synthesis has to be new, or the "diverse elements" would not have really been diverse in the first place.
So now, I see this response to something coming apart has to be about dealing with change (that would be the new element that made things come apart). Self-examination is a beginning step, and necessary one. But as we struggle to synthesize anew, more "new' is needed. It can be a change in places, people or things. The first "new" you pick up may not be the answer, but it is the necessary beginning.