Unless looked after, everything degrades over time. Well, nearly everything. Certainly most of the things that you care about. Your home, your car, your body, and even your relationships.

Setting time and resource aside to ensure that you are looking after the things that your care about is essential. We often run around chasing the next shiny goal, forgetting to put the work and love in to what we already have. This work can be untapped delight they we haven’t unlocked.

But we also need to do the hard stuff. We need to maintain the tools we use to carry out this work. As much as this can be the physical tools, the very resources we need, it is also ourselves. It is our skills, our patience and our acuity.

Let’s take an example. Someone loves their garden. They love tending to the flowers and they don’t even mind the weeding. But they aren’t really keen on mowing the lawn. They love the look of the rolling lawn and how it sets off the flower beds and borders. It creates drama with the topiary. So every week from Spring until Autumn they get the mower out and spend two hours mowing the lawn – trudging up and down, up and down, up and down, before sliding the mower back into the shed so that they can get on with dead-heading the roses and enjoying a lemonade in the hammock.

After twelve months the lawnmower breaks. So they get it repaired. This time it only takes nine months before the lawnmower breaks. The next time only six.

So they dig up the lawn and lay paving.

Gone is the beautiful rolling lawn. Gone is the juxtaposition to the flowerbeds and the topiary. All because they never cleaned the mower. They never sharpened the blades. They never added the oil

The pace of the world can take our breath away and the work to maintain our abilities which in turn maintain the things that we care about can be hard. In our relationships, this can lead to resentment.

We can use something we see often to illustrate this. An individual works very, very hard, to support their family and to “build the life that they enjoy”. Every week they have a “date night” – a tool used by millions of couples in order to ensure that they have time to enjoy each other’s company. But this individual hasn’t put the work in. They don’t really know what to talk about and they’ve disconnected from their partners passions. This individual talks about work. But their partner hasn’t put the work in so they don’t understand the dynamics of the conversation. The individual returns to work thinking “my husband doesn’t understand me”.

To keep what you love, put the work in.