Maintenance

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Recently some major maintenance on my house and garden has taken place. Where cars in this country are subject to a yearly maintenance check ~ for my house major maintenance is often done ‘as needed’, and the same goes, be it to a lesser extend, for my patio garden.
Yet now that it is all done, I am pleased with the result!

Living in a country where the creed of the Royal Family is “Je Maintiendrai” which translates to “I will maintain” ~ it makes me ponder ‘maintenance’...

Anything we would like to stay around in our lives needs to be maintained.
This is the case for material things like cars, houses, and gardens. It is also true for most other things in life. In order to keep something in our lives ~ or to keep something going ~ we need to put in time and effort. We need to maintain it.

Whether it is about friendships, family ties, or our Facebook presence ~ if we want to keep it around we need to maintain it.
It gets even closer to home when we are thinking about things like staying in shape, our physical, mental, and emotional health, our (youthful) appearance; life in general ~ the list can go on and on and on...

Like with major maintenance done to a house ~ there are aspects of our lives we maintain ‘as needed’. Other facets of our lives may do better with a continuous ‘maintenance plan’ where we put in a little bit of time every day in order to keep it where we want it to be.

Looking at it this way there are a great number of things we give time and effort every day ~ without even giving it a second thought. Usually we don’t look at it as ‘work’ as it is not job-related. It is just something we do...

It can be a good idea to evaluate all the things we are maintaining in our lives.
Just making a quick list of anything that comes to mind that we are giving time and effort on a regular basis ~ and then compare that to an equally swiftly created list of the things that are important to us.
This comparison can give us an indication whether we are spending our time and energy on our priorities ~ the things that are important to us ~ or if we are maintaining things in our lives that we really don’t care about anymore...
Or perhaps we find that what we thought were our priorities, in reality weren’t all that important to us at all...

Just observing where we stand on those things in our lives can then become very helpful in maintaining our balance in the life we live!
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