maintenance is hard
on things that last
I buy pastel colored flowers every two weeks, pour fresh water in daily. Watch them sit on my table counter, trap the afternoon light, slowly droop and wither. My room goes through cycles of renewal: the saturday morning deep clean — espresso and gloves and 4 different sprays. The mid-week slump. The end-of-week disarray. Then I do it all over again. The cycle opens. It closes. Spring or solstice, I witness signs of things ending. Groceries dwindle. The days get longer.
Do you care a lot about maintenance? I always have. I care about consistency, I crave regularity. But I’m always frustrated at how hard maintenance is. How easy it is to lose rhythm, lose momentum. How inertia anchors us into place. Nobody prepared me for how hard it is to maintain health, relationships, and a high calibre of quality in work and writing. Much less all at the same time.
A few variations of maintenance I think about often:
Physical: How do I nourish and move my body regularly? How do I manage exhaustion? How do I set schedules and routines?
Environmental: How do I actively curate and care for my home and workspace? How do I prune what I have to make space for what I need?
Spiritual: What do I read and absorb? What practices/rituals do I intentionally partake in?
Relational: Who do I choose to spend most of my time with? Who do I admire?
Halfway through the year and I’m thinking about what I wanted when this year started. What desires still persist. 70% of my friends are moving away from the city. My face looks different in photos. Or has it always looked this way? Things collapse, things repair. Last year I was on strong steroid medication and felt so out-of-body. I felt fragile. So this year has been about aliveness for me. I mean, really feeling the vitality of being here in this moment in time.
We exist in a land of quick fixes, of rapid change. We cycle through clothes, makeup, bodies, interests. The modern passage to self reinvention relies on disposability, on churn. I’ve stopped watching those videos on youtube. On Tiktok. The ones that convince me to buy more things, or urge me to keep up, keep up, keep up. When I watch them I never feel good, I just feel…consumed.
Perhaps it’s naive of me to say, but these days I find myself shifting my focus toward endurance. I’m starting to seek systems that are anchored in what I can sustainably do for the rest of my life. Repetition as depth.
The way I see it, all good things come from longevity of effort. Everything good requires upkeep. Whether you have a healthy body, good friends, steady relationships, a warm home, is dependent on sustained intention. It’s threaded through the small things: when you pour the fresh water in and you sweep the dust off the windowsill. And when you slip up you just do it again tomorrow. It’s when you devote time to people and you stay off your phone and you ask them about who they really are. It’s been a revelation to me that these small repeated actions add up to an entire life.
I took a bus to the Batteries and Bluffs trail the other week — the sound of wind overtook any music I was playing so I took off my airpods. The trail was freckled with slow-growing dune plants and jasmine wildflowers. From the ledge you could see the serpentine green of the Pacific Ocean billowing over to Marin. As I sat on the ledge, I thought about maintaining a capacity for wonder. Maybe it’s as simple as taking in the raw material of the world and weaving art from it. I see writing as continuity. I know it’s rare to find something that lasts, but perhaps I get to choose what does.
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PPS: You might like who do you admire or keeping promises to myself
Life inputs
📚 Currently reading: Escape from Freedom (good rec, S!)
✈️ Upcoming plans: A Northern European summer in Amsterdam, Sweden and Norway
⚡Upcoming energy: Having faith that things unravel in the right timing. That I don’t need to push or rush or feel burdened by the 5 steps ahead of me. Taking it day by day. Saying less and acting quietly.
Substacks I’m currently enjoying:
Human Stuff
Mind Mud
The Convival Society
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 “Pace Layering” (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, “Fast 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.”
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 “maintenance” were “endurance” & “resilience”. I thought it was interesting that you actually used “endurance” 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 “resilience”. Sheryl Sandberg in Option B described resilience as the capacity to endure pain... to endure the hard work. I loved that idea of the “small repeated actions” adding up to “an entire life”. Like you said, one day at a time ♥️