{"id":1181,"date":"2012-09-05T19:03:58","date_gmt":"2012-09-06T00:03:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/?p=1181"},"modified":"2012-09-05T10:24:55","modified_gmt":"2012-09-05T15:24:55","slug":"maintenance-everything-needs-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/2012\/09\/maintenance-everything-needs-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Maintenance \u2013 Everything Needs It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I was edging the lawn this week, I found myself thinking about how fast and easily the dirt and grass overtake the sidewalk.\u00a0 And I used to procrastinate doing it.\u00a0 Yet almost everything in our lives requires some maintenance \u2013 at least if we expect it to last.\u00a0 If you think about it, there\u2019s plenty of things you are happy to maintain \u2013 your relationships, your job, what else?\u00a0 What are the things that you take care of in life?<\/p>\n<p>When we start to think about it, there are many things that need our attention and care.\u00a0 Our cars need to have oil changes and the tires need air.\u00a0 Our clothes need to be laundered and dealt with \u2013 hung up or folded.\u00a0 Our dishes need to get washed.\u00a0 Our homes need to be cleaned periodically.\u00a0 Some of these can feel like work, yet we manage to get them done \u2013 at least most of the time.<\/p>\n<p>Maintenance is work \u2013 even when we realize the value of it.\u00a0 Even if these are things that are inconsistently done, you recognize the value of it.\u00a0 Life is full of things aren\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n<p>What I have come to realize is that virtually everything in our lives requires maintenance.\u00a0 Each piece of d\u00e9cor needs to be dusted eventually.\u00a0 The knives in my kitchen need to be sharpened.\u00a0 The clocks on the walls need batteries as well as to be changed twice a year.\u00a0 The lawnmower that helps me with the grass needs to be cleaned and sharpened.\u00a0 The heater needs a new filter regularly.\u00a0 The list goes on and on.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a decent argument for limiting the amount of stuff that we bring into our lives.\u00a0 How much time and energy do we want to spend maintaining that?\u00a0 Is that item worth the maintenance needed?<\/p>\n<p>Yet, we also cannot eliminate all things from our lives.\u00a0 We need things \u2013 I appreciate my dishes and the food that I put on them.\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t want to go around naked.\u00a0 I like sleeping on my mattress and box spring \u2013 even if I need to rotate the mattress regularly.<\/p>\n<p>We need things and therefore need to maintain those things.\u00a0 Therefore, consider these questions in reference to maintaining things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What comes more easily for you?\n<ul>\n<li>What makes that easier for you?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>What takes work to maintain; yet you still do it consistently?\n<ul>\n<li>What makes that worthwhile for you to work on it?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>What are you willing to do?\n<ul>\n<li>And then what are you potentially willing to give up to maintain this or that?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are no easy answers to maintaining things \u2013 or rather to developing new patterns of maintaining things.\u00a0 I encourage you to recognize the things that you already maintain. \u00a0Then you can use that knowledge you can gain from these successes and apply them to new areas needing maintenance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s occurred to me that virtually everything needs maintenance \u2013 yet not everything is easy for us to attend to, although there are some things to consider when working on maintaining things better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[10,8,18,5,9,7,22,4,17],"class_list":["post-1181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personaldevelopment","tag-behavior","tag-discipline","tag-goals","tag-household","tag-motivation","tag-procrastination","tag-productivity","tag-routines","tag-spaces"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7p82c-j3","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1181"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1184,"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions\/1184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jenniferlinnig.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}