017: The philosophy and elegance of maintenance
From broken to beloved: the life of things we keep
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
— William Morris
There’s something quietly intimate about oiling a hinge. You bend close, you listen for the silence between squeaks, you wipe the excess with care. It’s not glamorous. It’s not urgent. But it is an act of faith. To maintain is to believe that something is still worth keeping.
We don’t often think of maintenance as beautiful. The culture rarely celebrates it. There are no product launches for steady hands and soft cloths. But to tend to what already exists—to stitch, polish, reinforce, restore—is not a lesser art. It is, perhaps, the more necessary one.
The old country and the waiting
When I was younger, back in the old country, every neighborhood had a repair shop. Small, modest places, often run by one man with calloused hands and a radio playing quietly in the background. There was a shop for shoes, another for radios and toasters, another for appliances. Nothing fancy, but everything fixable.
We brought our broken things there without hesitation. A kettle that had stopped whistling. A fan that no longer turned. A blender with a stubborn hum. And we waited. Sometimes a few days, sometimes weeks. There was no impatience. No tracking number. No sense that we were being deprived. Waiting was part of the process. It was understood. It was even respected.
And here’s what’s important: it wasn’t always because we couldn’t afford a new one. In many cases, we could have. But we didn’t. Not out of stinginess or nostalgia, but because repairing was the right thing to do. It was a gesture of care, of continuity. An acknowledgment that the thing still had life in it. These appliances—solid, weighty, built with metal and screws instead of plastic seams—were made to be fixed. They were designed to last, and so they did. And we, in turn, upheld our end of the relationship by maintaining them.
We didn’t discard what still worked. We didn’t treat brokenness as failure. We took the time. We trusted the fix. We believed in what we had.
I remember how those shops smelled… glue and old electricity, warm dust and a hint of metal. I remember the short conversations over counters. The way things were wrapped in old newspaper when returned. I remember the satisfaction, not of getting something new, but of getting something back.
There was grace in the waiting. And there was pride in keeping things going. Maintenance wasn’t seen as second-rate or provisional. It was dignified. It meant something had been lived with, used well, and deserved more time.
We’ve lost something in the shift. Now, when something breaks, we’re told—implicitly or explicitly—that we’ve failed by owning it in the first place. Or that we should have bought the newer version. The default is discard and replace. And the culture rewards that speed.
The more I remember those days, the more I reflect on what Jenny Odell once asked: When everything is replaceable, what exactly is worth holding onto?