Maintain the Fish Tanks In Your Life

To me, my fish tank is a thing of beauty, sometimes I stand there just mesmerized by its comeliness. I even invite people over just to look at it, other fish enthusiasts, of course. Initially, setting up an aquarium is a lot of hard work, especially if you have a large tank. A lot of time, money and energy is invested for it to be successful. It truly is a labor of love.

Basically, an aquarium requires my being dedicated to weekly water changes, vacuuming the gravel, changing the filter media, pruning live plants, cleaning the glass, spending time observing my fish and keeping an eye on the water temperature and parameters. Sure, I can skip some of these steps, but if I want to have a thriving tank and healthy fish, each task deserves some regular attention and maintenance from me!

So my tank has been up and running smoothly for weeks, but the work is not over, it’s just beginning. This is no time for me to slack off and throw it into auto pilot because I can still run into problems. There may be times when I could have issues with my tank that may threaten the life of my fish, such as disease, or I could have something I’m currently dealing with now, snails. I hate snails. “Snails are like roaches” is what my local salesperson at the fish store says. Now, not every tank will have snails, but there is a chance if live plants are placed untreated into a tank, snails may be present. So, left untreated, I now spend a good amount of time plucking these suckers out of my tank and discarding them because they are a threat to my plants.

There are times, however, when I can’t stand to look at the darn thing and that’s when I have let too many days or weeks go by without giving my tank the needed care and maintenance. If the glass gets too much algae (high wattage from the lights) on it or if the water looks less than clean, I don’t even want to look at it, it’s almost non-existent. I see it, but I don’t. I won’t even bother feeding the fish because that will just add to the chaos in the tank. To me, it has lost its beauty and I’m no longer interested because I failed on maintenance.

Now, I’m a busy person and sometimes I just don’t have the time needed to take care of the maintenance as often as I would like, but I never let it get to a point where the tank is in danger. I find it necessary to have to make, and sometimes create, the time for maintenance in order to keep me interested and the tank free from disaster.

Where am I going with this? I was just thinking how relationships are like fish tanks. They need to be maintained, some things need to be changed, other things monitored, some things pruned and sometimes things, like snails, need to be removed for the overall health of the tank.

I’m just wondering what we do when problems arise in our relationships. Have we slacked on maintenance? Do we look the other way? Do we ignore the symptoms? Do we lose interest? Are we too tired to deal or are we quick to pluck these “snails” from our lives and make the necessary changes? Regular maintenance of your relationships, any relationship, is what will help it thrive into a thing of beauty. May you never be too tired or busy to maintain the fish tanks in your life.

PS - Here’s a link to small video of my fish tank. Okay one more.