Maintenance is about sacrificing the present for the future
Image by hannahlmyers from Pixabay
When something has been left in disuse for a long time, mother nature will reclaim it and return it to chaos. The longer left unattended, the more energy will be required to restore it. And leave it for too long, it might be beyond salvation and must be rebuilt. To keep something working properly, you must maintain it regularly. This is also the approach that will require the least amount of total time and energy and yield the best result. A complete restoration of something that has decayed, will require a lot more time and energy. Do a little every day is the way to go. Regular maintenance is about sacrificing the present for the future. However, there is also something extremely satisfying with cleaning and restoring disused things to their former glory.
Maintenance work can be divided into two groups: Things that are visible when you do them, and things that are visible when you do not do them. Paradoxically, the latter one might be more important, but because of the lack of instant feedback we often gravitate towards the prior one. For example, if you go to the gym once, you will not see any difference at all. Do it every day for a year however, and you will get in fantastic shape. It works the other way too. Skipping one day of exercise will not be noticeable but skip it for a year and you will clearly see negative results. This is true on every level, but the time scale varies. With the lawn in front of your house, the time frame is more like one or two weeks. On a societal level, you could perhaps neglect maintenance for a decade or more without a noticeable decline. Bur rest assured, if what we neglected was indeed important, we will pay the price for a long time. If the slow descent into chaos is allowed for too long, it can even be the end of us.
About two years ago, me and my wife took over her grandparents’ house. Her grandfather was a passionate tennis enthusiast and a productive entrepreneur. That is why we now have a tennis court at our estate. The tennis court however, had been left disused for at least a decade and was in bad shape when we got here. The surface was covered in moss and small trees were growing in through the side fences. We both saw the potential in this magnificent facility, and I have been working hard with the restoration of this old tennis court for the past two summers. Some hundred wheelbarrows of moss later, and with the nearby small trees removed it is now nearing completion. Yesterday we reached an especially important milestone: High pressure washing the surface with hot water. I had been waiting for that day since the very start. The washing is the type of work that provides instant feedback, whereas the two summers of wheelbarrowing thick moss and cutting trees while being eaten by a billion mosquitoes, hardly provided any feedback at all. It still looked like crap after every session. But this very weekend, it is once again playable in God knows how many years. When the pressure washer was engaged and started to peel off the moss growth, revealing the bright color of the surface, I was filled with a sense of intense joy in my whole body. It was truly an amazing feeling. Our sacrifice had started to deliver an amazing future.
We had hired a professional washing service, and 600 m2 isn’t exactly cheap to clean. In the weeks leading up to the washing session, I therefore devoted all my available energy to prepare. The consequence is that our house is extremely messy (we got two Labradors) and the grass on our lawn is almost knee-height. You only have a finite amount of energy that you can distribute on maintenance. Each action will have a reaction and the choice of how to invest the time is yours. The critical part here is that it was an active choice. We chose to let our estate deteriorate somewhat, because the value that a proper tennis court can provide cannot be calculated. We sacrificed the present for the future. Now it is time to fire up the lawn mower and vacuum cleaner, and balance things out a bit. Honestly, it has never felt so good to do that before.