Deferred Maintenance

Three months ago, while on a road trip, the words Deferred Maintenance dropped into my awareness and pressed me with urgency. I’ve gotten familiar with the way my sources of inspiration arrive. Like a boa constrictor, the words grab hold of my attention and start winding their way around my consciousness. As they do, I become acutely aware of my environment and my presence within it. At the time, my focus sharpened upon the houses lining the primitive roadway we were traveling. Having long ago traded in their architectural charm of yesteryear, they now appeared as tear-stained haunted expressions of what they once were. Their moss-covered roofs, faded paint, and askew doors awoke an unexpected sadness within me. Their durable sesquicentennial construction now stood as visual testimonials of unknown stories with not so happy endings.

I wondered what had befallen this stretch of highway and left hardship in its wake. I questioned if the corridors that once rang with laughter had any portents of their now swollen, weeping walls. I was also deeply curious why this set of words so desperately wanted my attention. I knew they pointed at something yet unrecognized about YOU.logy, but their clarity remained evasive. I wrote them down and trusted they would find me again.

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As I sit here writing this, my husband and I have entered the ever-stressful state of selling our home. Guess what? The words have found their way back to me and now parade their painful truth across our horizon. We have abided in our home for 24 years. Seventeen of those years were shared with the demands of building a business. During that time, these sturdy walls held our life and blessed us with protection and warmth. Distracted by other pursuits and demands, we took what our house offered and were far less generous in return.

Don’t get me wrong, every inch of this home has received some measure of our affection, effort, and hard-earned money. But often, our time and financial constraints required our house to speak in full blown protestation before we would arrest our lives enough to address its needs. Broken water pipes have a way of getting your attention in a way a dripping faucet cannot.

But what happens when we defer maintenance? Small problems become bigger problems. Minor repairs become costly ones. Band-aid fixes may alleviate short term consequences, but when relied upon, they become a form of self-imposed ransomware. We become prisoners to our own neglect.

Currently, Ken and I have two windows that may as well have bars on them because they stand between us and our new beginning. Through our own choice, their care has been so poorly looked after, they are now inoperable. We knew and disclosed this fact when we listed the house, and we were hopeful that our location and the love and care we put everywhere else in the house would create a strong enough emotional response that the windows just became a small negotiation point. (One we were fully prepared to address and accommodate monetarily.) As it works out, prospective buyers do not find our inoperable windows a particularly “charming feature” Similarly, we do not find it any too appealing to invest several thousand dollars in windows that only the new owners will enjoy. And yet, that is precisely where we stand.

Everything Teaches…

There is nothing about our current situation that is not stressful. And I am starting to realize every bit of stress comes on the heels of resistance or postponement of what needs to be done. While not enthralling, these darn windows have become my teacher, and I am going to share what I am learning.

We moved into our home with two cats. Our living room windows are seated quite low and extend up five feet. Both of our cats had claws, and the window screens were a delicious tactile experience for them. To protect the screens, I removed them and subconsciously decided we would not open the windows in the lower level where the cats spend most of their time.

Meanwhile, early in our ownership, our association hired an inexpensive and equally inexperienced paint contractor for the exterior of our home. While attempting to clean our windows shortly after, we discovered they had been painted shut. With limited time and resources, we made the decision to leave things ‘as is’ because we were FEARFUL of breaking the windows and did not feel prepared to deal with any consequences if things went sideways.

Fast forward a few more years, our association made similarly disadvantageous choices with the paint contractors, and we watched as our windows and doors accrued more layers of questionable paint applications. While our monetary situation was improving, we were still running a business and working an insane number of hours, and we wanted nothing more than to come home to a quiet, undisrupted setting. Having already gotten accustomed to not using the windows, it was not a hard decision to maintain our comfort even when we noticed the window situation progressing in an unfavorable way. We did this unconsciously. It wasn’t like we sat down, discussed it, and agreed to neglect the windows. We just silently agreed to keep our home and lives undisrupted.

Rather recently, I was planting flowers in our window box and noticed that the window trim looked contoured, not angled. I asked Ken about it, and we concluded this must have happened during the last painting cycle. It appears the paintable surface of the windowsill was so compromised that someone filled it with caulk and painted over it. It was a little frustrating, but when you choose to live within a “homeowner’s association” you knowingly agree to share maintenance tasks. And while I have been decidedly disappointed with a number of their contractor selections, I have always fallen back on appreciating that I did not have to make the decisions or do the work. And that is about as far as my thinking went at the time.

But today, as I feel a resistance point at every possible solution, I realize how our consistent choice for comfort has left us feeling terrified and trapped. At this point, attempting to “repair” the windows could lead to needing to replace them. Needing to replace them may reveal bigger problems and this is not where we would prefer to spend our money. And in every scenario, I cannot escape the question, “how is this going to affect our plans to successfully close on this house and have its proceeds for our new home?”  It is as if we hoisted a sword of Damocles directly over our heads and live with the constant threat of demise.

I know that sounds very dramatic, but as I go about my business preparing our home for showings, dutifully stowing away the unsightly proof that we engage in oral hygiene, and making the bed replete with throw pillows I would never ordinarily use; I can’t help but feel like I am attempting to curate a picture perfect space while secretly dreading when our truth is discovered.   This charade is so uncomfortable…and ridiculously familiar.

Sometimes I truly dislike how life teaches us our lessons. The way Ken and I have lived in our home is not particularly different than how most of us inhabit our lives. We all have conversations we know are necessary, and yet we avoid them. We all have destructive patterns that persist because we ignore them. We all have situations in our lives that require us to seek out information and learn new skills, and we repeatedly choose to circumvent such discomfort. And dare I say, we all have greatness within us that we refuse to explore.

Just like our decisions with our home, most of us avoid exploring our internal landscape because we fear the disruption it is going to cause. As a society, we have access to a lot of social tools that cosmetically conceal what we are unwilling to address. And it is easy to unwittingly accommodate our behaviors in service to avoiding the perceivably more difficult options. But just like how I feel every morning when I make my bed, we can attempt to distract each other with pretty presentations of ourselves, but down deep we fear our unattended parts being discovered. Whether it is unexamined flaws or untapped potential, its revelation terrifies us. And yet…its revelation leads to new freedom.

Selling our home feels like a loud, slobbering monster of a metaphor for living with shame. When we believe there is some part of us that is flawed, defective or problematic, and we do not believe we have the inner resources to deal with it, we do a lot to avoid and distract ourselves from it. But our internal deferred maintenance keeps us trapped in cycles of resistance, fear, and anxiety. These uncomfortable emotional states rarely lead to healthy behavioral choices, rather, we contract in the face of them and create separation from ourselves and others.

I know you didn’t need to hear about our windows…but the parallels were too important to NOT share. The truth is, we all have frayed carpet, broken ice makers, and dripping faucets within. Do they need our immediate attention? Probably not, initially. And your ego will be quick to make heroic arguments for choosing complacency. But you must ask yourself, what am I trading in or losing when I decide to stay comfortable? And if I can be perfectly honest about my experience, the comfort zone of the past is not proving to be all that comfortable after all!

Much like a home inspection, YOU.logy is an examination of you. You can do it alone, but most of us struggle to see beyond the superficial personae or well-rehearsed stories of catastrophe. We all benefit when an objective onlooker knocks on the door of our personality and meets it with curiosity and interest. Conversational prospecting allows us to explore the attic and crawl space of each other and discover ways we may be overlooking something of value or have unconsciously limited our greatest use or enjoyment of ourselves. Remaining unfamiliar with our internal landscape is as uncomfortable as what Ken and I fear finding behind the rotten windowsill. That discomfort will fool us into making micro behavioral accommodations, but not without a cost. Our inner authority will grow ever more uneasy as we create more distance from it. Suddenly we are living a life that feels both inauthentic and impassable. The only way out is through.

When Ken and I finally address these stuck windows, (which is exactly what we will have to do) we will feel more at ease with our showings and selling position. There will be far fewer resistance points and far less stress. This is true about us, as well. When we do the work, allow the disruption and TRULY SEE what is real about our SELF, we discover that we abide in the world with a tremendous amount of freedom. There are no monsters waiting to be discovered. There are no cosmetic games designed to distract. We may still have worn carpet here and there, but we are at ease because we are at home in our own lives.

I would love to hear your thoughts and reactions.