Maintenance is Magic

I'm not great at maintenance. Most of my work is driven by sudden impulse and sustained hyper-focus. This is, unfortunately, not sustainable. The initial burst of energy inevitably fades and leaves me with almost-completed projects or outlines of things-that-could-be. To patch up these gaps between bursts of inspiration, I learned how to write software and automate as much of my life as possible.

Some of this technique is new and steeped in techno-capital: remnants of the blogosphere I used to productivity hack my way out of depression. Mostly though, it's ancient.

Life is a dance to minimize entropy. Everything falls apart without routine maintenance. One of my most "aha! the secrets of the universe!" type memories is that of garbage trucks beginning their day as I end a long night of running an event.

To live, we rely on a stupefying array of systems- man-made and otherwise. Without maintenance, our environments slowly become hostile. Dirty corners of rooms harbor pathogens. Squeaky vehicle brakes fail catastrophically. Unaddressed mental tensions tie us up into knots.

Mostly, I notice problems when things are already closer to failing than I'd like. The solution is frustratingly simple. Routine maintenance.

Regularly doing a bit of maintenance wipes the entropy out of the system before it becomes a problem. Looking closely at the guts of any system we interact with also lets us notice things we would have missed otherwise. With regular maintenance, I've learned to catch subtler and subtler issues before they get large enough to affect any of my life-support systems.

I catch more discomfort in my body before it turns into frustration that bleeds out during a disagreement and hurts a loved one. I catch more weird mechanical issues before my devices stop working.

Routine maintenance keeps life humming along. The magic starts to show up when you give just a liiitle more than you need to.

Because we're interdependent with our systems and our systems are interdependent with each other, small improvements have outsized (though often silly and mundane) effects. Adding 10% more love, care, and attention to your routine maintenance eliminates so much friction from the web of systems you interact with that things seem to just happen- sometimes almost before you notice that they're needed.

When the kitchen is clean, the cats are fed, the plants are watered, the day's work is done, and the kettle has been recently descaled, it can feel almost like your home is conspiring to brew you a cup of chamomile.

This is of course happening against the backdrop of a seemingly never-ending deluge of minor inescapable inconveniences but they get so much easier to deal with when most of your life is routinely maintained. The minor inconveniences of life may even seem to take care of themselves.

That said, getting things to a point where they're humming along smoothly is daunting if everything is currently screeching and creaking, but routine maintenance will slowly bring you up to a stable baseline and then, step by step, invite a little bit of magic into your life.

Maintenance keeps us above the entropic waterline.

Wipe the counter. Tighten the screw. Stretch the muscle.

It's all that deep.