Everything I Do Is Secretly A Repair

You set aside ten minutes for yourself and something went wrong with them.

You know the ten minutes. The ones you told yourself you were going to take, on the evening you were quite pleased with yourself for taking them. And within about thirty seconds you had turned them into something with a purpose.

It happens so fast it barely registers. You sit down, and the sitting down alone feels slightly wrong, so you reach for something useful. And now the ten minutes are a treatment, or a routine, or a thing you are doing so that something improves, and the moment they became that, they stopped being for you and started being for the improvement.

This is the article the whole of this site rests on. Everything else here is a variation of it.

There are two different acts, and from the outside they look exactly the same.

One of them is care. The other is repair.

Same ten minutes. Same hands, same room, same water. The difference is entirely inside the person doing it, and it is the difference between a thing done because this body is yours and a thing done because this body is not yet acceptable.

And almost everything you do for yourself is the second one. You have not noticed, because the second one is what you have always done, and because it hides so well. It uses the same language. It borrows the word care and wears it comfortably.

But you can find it, because it leaves a mark.

Repair always has a small watching in it. A checking afterward. A quiet question of whether it worked, and a slight sinking if it did not.

Care has no watching. Care is over when it is over.

Nourisheth and cherisheth

There is a sentence in Ephesians that arrives in the middle of a passage about marriage, and one clause of it is doing something people walk straight past.

For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: (Ephesians 5:29, King James Version)

Nourisheth and cherisheth it.

Two words, and they are not the same word twice.

Nourish is the practical one. Feeding, keeping, maintaining. Anybody would grant you that a body has to be nourished, and you do it, mostly, in a rushed way, between other things.

Cherish is the one that stops you. Cherish is not maintenance. You do not cherish something in order to keep it functioning. Cherishing is what you do with a thing you are fond of, and it produces nothing, and that is precisely the point of it.

And notice the sentence assumes this. It does not command it. It says no man ever yet hated his own flesh, as though tending your own body were simply the obvious behavior of a person, requiring no argument, so plainly ordinary that it can be used as the illustration for something else.

Which means the thing you find so difficult is being described as the baseline.

And then look at what it is compared to. Even as the Lord the church. The comparison for how a person should treat their own body is how Christ treats the people He gave Himself for. Not efficiently. Not conditionally on improvement. That is the standard the sentence reaches for, casually, in passing.

Cherishing this body is described as the ordinary behavior of a person, and it has never once been something to be earned first. Ephesians 5:29 puts nourish and cherish side by side and assumes both, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary thing possible for somebody who has never done it.

How to tell which one you are doing

Here is the practical test, and it is one question.

Do you check afterward?

That is all. If you do a thing for your body and then look to see whether it worked, that was repair. If you do it and it is simply over, that was care.

You can run this on anything. The walk you took: were you checking how you felt afterward, or did you just walk? The bath: was it a bath, or was it an attempt to be less tired tomorrow? The early night: did you rate it in the morning?

Do not be discouraged when almost everything comes out as repair. That is the expected result and it is not a verdict on you. Repair is what a person does when they have been treating themselves as a problem for long enough, and the checking is not greed, it is anxiety wearing sensible clothes.

But once you can see it, you can do one thing differently, and one is genuinely enough to start.

You are able to tell the two apart in your own hands, and the checking has never once been the part that did any good. The written word puts cherishing beside nourishing as though both were obvious, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a person which of the two they are actually doing.

Ten minutes with no other side

So here is the assignment.

Do one ten minute thing tonight that has no before and after.

Ten minutes, because you have got ten minutes, and because an hour would become a project.

And the requirement is only this: it must be something that cannot be assessed. If there is any way to check whether it worked, pick something else.

Sit outside for ten minutes. Put your hands in warm water and leave them there. Lie on the floor. Listen to one piece of music with your eyes shut and nothing else happening. Brush your hair. Drink something warm sitting down instead of standing up.

Notice that none of those produce anything. That is not a flaw in the list. That is the specification.

And when you are done, do not review it. Do not decide whether it helped, do not judge whether you feel better, and do not consider whether to build it into a routine. Building it into a routine is repair reappearing in its most respectable disguise, and it is the one that catches almost everybody.

Ten minutes. Then get up and go and do the washing up.

You are able to do something that produces nothing at all, and a thing with no result has never once been a waste of ten minutes. Ephesians 5:29 sets cherishing beside nourishing without requiring it to accomplish anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in ten minutes that were not for a purpose.