On Maintenance
“Maintenance in every form (your body, your work, the things you own) is both absolutely necessary and optional at the same time. It’s easy to put off, yet it must be done. Defer it now, and regret is inevitable.
Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going.
Every living thing spends a great deal of time and toil maintaining its own life and the life of the systems it depends on. Plants tend the life of the soil they grow in. Beavers maintain their dams and thereby the pond that protects them. Humans maintain their bodies, their vehicles, their homes, and their cities, along with much else. Nearly everything worth maintaining is nested in something larger, even more maintaining.
But so much of doing maintenance is tiresome. Brush the damn teeth, change the damn oil. They are unrewarding chores – repetitive, boring, often frustrating, and endless. Since that part of maintenance is a pain, we shirk it, defer it, fail to budget time and money for it, let it sink to the bottom of the priority list. That’s easy to do because the necessity of maintenance accumulates invisibly and gradually. Then, suddenly, one day, the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops in a turmoil of disruption, expense, and blame.
The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary, and maintenance is optional. It is easy to put off, yet it has to be done. Defer now, regret later. Neglect kills.
What to do? Instead of thinking of maintenance as only a preventive function, let maintenance be part of the entire grand process of keeping a thing going.
There is no ‘done’. Occasional repair is part of the process. Close monitoring is part of the process. Changing the oil is part of the process. Eventually, replacing is part of the process. Maintenance in this sense has nothing optional about it. When you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it.”
– Introduction, Maintenance of Everything: Part One by Stewart Brand
