bits and bants vol. 4

why maintaining matters

Svolvaer Harbour at the Height of the Fishing Season.Study from Lofoten by Anna Katarina Boberg

Hope you all have had a good week, we’re about to go back to regular winter temperatures around here so our blessedly warm January has come to an end.

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This week as I loaded my fiftieth washing machine load of the week, or cooked one more meal I thought about what makes up my days. It’s mostly this maintenance type of work - the work of keeping people alive, a house running, food coming in and getting cooked, maintaining a certain amount of order and cleanliness, etc. This is work that feels repetitive, of course. It also feels thankless a lot of the time, especially when you’re doing work for your own young offspring who have never known a world without all these things happening for them magically every single day!

But maintenance is surprisingly important as all mothers know. We know how dramatically laundry multiplies when we miss just one day of laundry. We see the decay spread within our homes when the counter goes unwiped and the floor unswept for an extra 24 hours. Garbage breeds when we don’t maintain constant vigilance against the clutter and detritus that multiple people bring home every day. If we don’t maintain, destruction follows.

If we don’t maintain culture, custom, and civilization destruction becomes the default.

I think that part of the importance of maintenance is not just keeping the wheels of home and life turning, but providing the foundation to give people freedom to pursue creativity, leisure, learning, and relationship. We can’t create when surrounded by chaos. It is distracting and difficult to appreciate beauty when surrounded by ugliness. To build something new we usually have to have the building blocks of the art form to work with.

Maintaining order, beauty, and comfort are essential for building new things. But the creativity and new things are the smallest part of the pie while the maintaining takes up the majority. Maintaining is difficult because it is repetitive, but it is essential.

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Bits

• This article got me thinking about art in ways that I had never thought of before, and coming from Willa Cather and Simone Weil always means good things.

• Thinking about mercy less as something that needs to always be perfect and more about actually practicing it is explored in this wonderful piece from Plough.

• Amy Welborn is the GOAT.

• If you’d like me to go on a two hour rant about what’s wrong with the world, let’s begin with this latest PEW research on parenting. Where. To. Be. Gin. Seriously. Parents are what’s wrong with the world. What do we desire for our children?? We desire money?? Job satisfaction?! That’s the best we can desire and hope for!?! We don’t want them to build and create family, lasting legacies, express self-sacrificial love to those around them?!? Seriously. I am enraged.

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Reading, Watching, What Have You

Not too much to report this week. Because where did my time go?? I blame my children who should be more focused on procuring a satisfactory but also money making profession and taking up less of my attention. I did finally finish Three Pines. There is so much I didn’t like about it as an adaptation that I will write an entirely separate piece on it someday. But to sum up, it was trying too hard, but at the same time, boring.

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I’m off to drive kids places, but do let know your thoughts on maintaining life. Do you maintain your interests, passions, small enjoyments along the way?

Happy weekend,

Christy