What You Do Not Maintain, You May Lose

Something very unexpected happened some months ago that thought me the need for maintenance. The door to one of the rooms started making a slight noise when closing and opening it. When I took a close look, I found that the nails of one of the hinges was pulling out. I said okay, that I will manage it since it does not look bad. Instead of calling a carpenter to change the nail or even doing it myself, I kept managing it. My mind moved away from the noise, probably because I got used to it. So after a few months, as I was about to open the door, it fell. At that point, I had to call the carpenter. I spent more to hang back the door, plus the inconveniences. All these would have been avoided if I took the issue of early maintenance seriously. Same way in life, what you do not maintain, you may stand the risk of losing it.

What a lot of people do not understand is that the small maintenance of today can prevent a big problem tomorrow. Take the case of health for example. There are some people who would never go for checkup. In fact, they will not even take their health seriously, not even when they are experiencing symptoms, they would want to manage it. The only time they will visit a clinic is when they finally break down, and by then, the issue may have complicated, and it will become difficult. Maintenance does not mean that you are weak, rather it is even a way to preserve your strength, so that it will not eventually degenerate and turn to weakness.

Maintenance cuts across almost all aspects of the human life. Take academic success for example. A student may study very hard to pass an exam excellently well and with flying colours. But what they also need to understand is that success is not a one-time thing, but a continuous progression. If the student stops reading, stops studying, practising, or revising their books, their knowledge will begin to go down. The once very brilliant student may even fall below average. Take an athlete for example, maybe a footballer. No matter what he has achieved in the field of football, and no matter the trophies and individual awards he has, if he stops training, his skills will degenerate.

I have also discovered that maintenance culture comes into play in personal habits. Someone may decide to wake up in the morning, do a workout, eat rightly, all these for a few weeks. The results then start to show; they will become healthier, more energetic, better focused. But if the routine gets abandoned, the progress that was accumulated would be gone. The body will return back to how it was. This shows that success is not about just one big action that you take once in a while, rather it is about continuous daily small steps that will accumulate over time. Maintenance may not feel convenient for you, but at the end, you will see that it is worth it.

It is worthy to note that even your material possessions also need maintenance. Take your car for example, if you do not take your car for servicing as at when due, a time will come when it will develop faults which would have been easily avoided. Or maybe your house may develop crack and you may think it is just minor. If you do not fix it on time, it might develop into something really serious. Even things as common as your mobile phones need to be maintained. Imagine using your phone in a rough manner without even taking care of it, it may develop faults with time. This is just to tell you how important maintenance is.

You have to also understand that maintenance is a real test of responsibility and maturity. You do not have to wait until something goes wrong before you do maintenance, rather you do it so as to prevent it from going wrong. Developing maintenance culture is a choice that you need to make, not because it is convenient, but because it is necessary.

Thanks for reading