It's a grey morning and an old car is sitting on the ramp at the garage. Its owner is in the waiting room with a cup of machine coffee, fingers crossed, hoping it sails through without a big bill.
If you've ever owned a car that was past its best, you know that feeling. Sometimes it passes and you walk out grinning. Sometimes something you never knew about turns up, and you're handed a bill you didn't see coming.
The test nobody books
In the UK, once a car is three years old it needs an MOT every year. The point is to make sure it's still safe and roadworthy, and to fix anything that isn't before it causes real trouble.
I'm guessing you're more than three years old. So when did your life last get one?
When did you last stop, step out of the day to day, and look honestly at how things are going? Your health. Your relationships. Your work. Your money. How you feel when you wake up in the morning.
What it might be costing you
The worrying thing about the faults a garage finds is that they were there all along. You were driving around with them. They might have been putting you at risk, and if they were making the car run badly they were probably costing you money too.
Life's the same. Some things haven't changed in years and you've stopped noticing them. Are they still working for you? Is something about to go wrong that you could fix now, while it's still small?
And it's rarely one thing in isolation. If one part of your life is flying and another is quietly falling apart because of it, that's worth knowing too. Plenty of us have had a great year at work and a rubbish year everywhere else.
Pass or fail
For me, the measure isn't the bank balance or the car on the drive. It's whether I've got peace of mind, which I wrote about in What is success?. That's the standard I test against. You might pick a different one, and that's fine, as long as it's yours.
Reading this back, I'd add one thing. A proper check is rarely comfortable, and it's always useful. The parts I least want to look at are usually the ones that need it most.
Grab a pen and score each part of your life out of ten, health, people, work, money and fun. Pick the lowest score, and write down one repair you could make this month.
First published June 2017.
