Time for Maintenance?

With maintenance

I woke up thinking about my daughter’s boyfriend and his car.  There seem to be a bunch of things wrong with it, all at the same time, which we expect will cost a lot of money to fix.  Last night he was sitting at our kitchen table, dismayed. 

Of course there is never a budget to use for this type of purpose – when something unexpectedly breaks.  In this case, we all understand how hard our lives are without transportation, and, I’m sure we all have been in this same type of situation.  I, personally, don’t know anything about cars and maintenance.  The only thing I know about a car is that you put the key in to turn it on to make it go.  One day, maybe, I’ll tell you how I added oil through the little dip stick thing when I knew it needed some.  When I was around 19 years old, because of lack of my preventative maintenance, I had to replace a transmission at a most inopportune time in my life.  Of course it was also at a time when I had no money to pay for it.

That started me thinking about how we ignore things like that “engine knock” until we can’t ignore it anymore.  I’m not just speaking about ignoring maintenance that our car or home may require, but “maintenance” for our own bodies, our minds, and more.

There’s a saying by an unknown author, “Pay now or pay later. But pay you will”.  This can be associated with every part of our lives if you think about it.  If we ignore our health, we will pay for it sometime in the future.  If we ignore our relationships, our jobs, our clients, our kids, our faith, our …. well, pretty much everything…. we might just wind up paying for it in a way that will be displeasing to us down the line. 

If I’m not being clear enough, I’ll define what I’m trying to explain a little further.  If we ignore the things in our lives like our health, jobs, or loved ones, we might wind up with a negative outcome that we certainly may not want: we may become sick, we might lose our job, or we might have a displeasing relationship.  If we choose to ignore our negative thinking or something internally bothering us, that might, too, affect every area of our day including our health and performance. 

Think about it.  The concept of not devoting time for maintenance to things that we should attend to, both internally and externally that affects our lives, can lead to unfavorable outcomes. 

This proactive-type of thinking ties into the Time to Play Philosophy: you need to be happy, healthy, have money and a work life balance to have quality of life.  If you really think about it, this concept is very valid.  But, many times we ignore things because we don’t have time to address them, or we ignore things because we just don’t want to deal with something.  In my observations and my own experience, if you ignore something long enough, it will eventually come back to “bite you”.

What to do?  Take an evaluation of your health, happiness, financial situation and work life balance.  Those things you have pushed aside for way too long.  Make a list of priorities of where you can BEGIN to address these things.  Need to lose weight?  Need to look for a new job?  Need to start that retirement or college savings account?  Need to find a way to better organize or delegate at work so you can enjoy more freedom and flexibility? 

Yes, looking proactively at your life situations instead of the easy way out (for now) of ignoring things may seem overwhelming.  The “for now” in that sentence re-emphasizes that ignoring is easy – for now – but may not provide you with an easy end.  My philosophy is to learn what you need to know to enjoy life.  That’s why I started Time to Play.  So I could regain control over things that would enable me to better enjoy MY life. 

Look at your list.  What can you do to make one small change… just one baby step… to start to do that “maintenance”?  I believe that one small change is better than no change at all.  And, you may be surprised to find that once you start to make little changes, your life may become more pleasant and settled.

Time for maintenance?  Take a look.  It’s definitely easier to “pay” now with a little prevention than to “pay” later with negative health, marriage, job loss, or worse.

If you need a jump start, we have all sorts of coaches to help you in your journey to make changes or improvements.  Just give us a call at 631-331-2675 or email: info@timetoplay.com

It’s time to enjoy YOUR life!  It’s Time to Play!  www.TimetoPlay.com = Resources for a better life.