Learning to Maintain

A couple of months ago, I was faced with a maintenance issue in my flat. It escalated so quickly that I needed someone to immediately come and help me because it was now an emergency. Because this unfortunate event happened after hours, nobody had a permit to work at night, which meant that I had to nurse the situation until morning, until a professional could come and fix it. A lot of the times when we are in emergency situations it is easy to be inconsolable and if we do not have the right people there willing to help us, it can become a mess really quick.

Immediately I contacted the closest people to me, both physically and emotionally, and explained the situation. In that moment I did not feel alone in the situation even though I was physically alone. So I got through the night and had someone lined up to come and fix it first thing in the morning. Immediately when the kind handyman showed up, he knew exactly what the problem was and he was able to fix it in less than 30 minutes.

After everything was done and dusted I sat and thought about the word “maintenance”. 

The up keeping of equipment or property, the act of maintaining a certain state of being. 

It hit me that in a lot of situations in life we love the excitement of starting something new. That something new can be a project, a YouTube page, a new relationship, a different lifestyle choice, exercise, literally anything! We love starting something new and having hope about the possible outcomes of that thing. But how many of us have started something but later lost the level of energy and commitment that you had in the beginning? We only realise as time has gone by and we are now faced with a crisis, that we have not done the necessary work at maintaining what we started.

The craziest thing to me was that as soon as the handyman looked at the what was happening, he immediately knew what the problem was and he knew how to fix it. He knew what the system was supposed to look like and could identify the fact that I was working with something outdated and faulty. And that’s the hard thing about anything that we do. If we do not know what a good example looks like, if we do not know what an updated system looks like, then we’re going to keep thinking that what we have is good when in fact it is a ticking time bomb.

 Are we really able to do the work needed in order to maintain certain parts of our lives? Do we even know what method can get us there?

In relationships particularly, I have realised that part of maintenance is asking the right questions. Some of the questions that I’ve found that help to maintain, are:

1)      Is there anything bothering you lately that we haven’t gotten a chance to talk about?

2)      How can I help you through this?

3)      Is there something that we used to do, that helped to keep us connected, that we have now grown too lazy to do?

4)      Anything new happening in your life? (This can be good and bad)

These simple questions help to maintain closeness and communication in relationships. Some people are not going to automatically speak their minds, but prompts like this can help to keep everyone on the same page.

What in your life needs maintenance?


I am an Occupational Therapist by profession, but I have many roles that bring meaning to my life. In short, I love people, books and love.

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