Maintenance

We do not value maintenance.

Maintenance, for those that wonder, is the act or state of maintaining something. Maintenance is a critical function to mechanical systems. Without maintenance, your car will eventually explode, your air conditioner will give up the ghost, your yard will overrun you in a tangle of weeds and vines.

The same is true of us: we need time and resources to maintain ourselves.

Our physical bodies - for certain. We take for granted (sometimes shockingly so) that we will continue to function day after day in the same state we are in. There's always time to do work, we tell ourselves, but not enough time to insure that things like exercise or sleep or good eating. These, we seem to reason, can be squeezed in around the margins (after all, what we are doing right now is so terribly important)so what's the worry. Then we fall asleep when commuting, or collapse after going up a hill, or go to the doctor's and get the news that we didn't expect to hear. Suddenly, we seem to find the time.

Our mental selves - equally as well, although this is far more difficult for most of us to see or argue. We become so consumed by what we are doing - if at work, with the urgent things that need to get done, if at home, with the major things that need to get done when we are not at work - that we let the maintenance of our intellect, of our souls go by the wayside. We reason that we can (again) squeeze this into the margins, that what we are doing at the moment is so important that we can hold off a little longer, that we can place the down time of the soul into 10 or 15 minute slices of time.

But the same thing that happens physically happens mentally and spiritually: we find ourselves burned out, empty of ideas, sitting in front of our computer with nothing to write (not that it's happened to me personally, of course), wondering why we can't find the energy or time to do anything.

Eventually, of course, the rest of our lives suffer: the work becomes inefficient, the writing becomes strained, our relationships become a series of intersecting moments of our soul down time and theirs, our activities become a series of pointless acts leading nowhere - because we have trained ourselves through busyness that everything must lead to something. The concept that something leads to the betterment of ourselves through rest and intellectual thought but produces nothing escapes farther and farther away, until it is like a foreign language we think we knew but can't translate now.

That maintenance of ourselves is as important as the activities we do seems axiomatic; the fact that almost no-one (including ourselves) sees it this way should concern us a great deal more than it does.