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Johann's avatar

Thanks a lot for sharing. This reminded me of two things:

- One of my favorite writers is Debbie Chachra who writes (and cares) about maintenance a lot, particularly of large systems. You might find her writing relatable (if yet unknown to you). For example here: https://comment.org/care-at-scale/.

- The second thing that came to mind was Stewart Brand thinking on ā€œPace Layeringā€ (https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2) and the fact that it is only as we grow older and have longer observation periods to look at that we can start discerning between the faster moving layers (TikTok Fashion) and the slower (but much more powerful) ones (Culture or large infrastructures). As Brand writes, ā€œFast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.ā€

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Heaven Leigh's avatar

I’m still working on practicing putting my every day life into words, so when I read your essays I’m always comforted to see some of my own emotions in writing.

I’m not sure if you can relate, but some other words that came to mind when I read ā€œmaintenanceā€ were ā€œenduranceā€ & ā€œresilienceā€. I thought it was interesting that you actually used ā€œenduranceā€ to describe HOW you’re doing the upkeep of your daily life. And yes maintenance is hard and sometimes hard is pain, which is why I thought of ā€œresilienceā€. Sheryl Sandberg in Option B described resilience as the capacity to endure pain... to endure the hard work. I loved that idea of the ā€œsmall repeated actionsā€ adding up to ā€œan entire lifeā€. Like you said, one day at a time ā™„ļø

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