I leave my tonearm locked with the cuing lever up when I’ve finished listening for the day. There are enough earthquakes in my neck of the woods to keep me sufficiently paranoid.
A back-to-front brushing has never hurt my stylus or cantilever in my sixty-very odd years of spinning discs, no matter how stiff the stylus brush might be. It’s fun, too, to hear the "rriiiipp!" through the speakers as I do this. Just don’t have the volume set too high. Every couple days or so, I wet the stylus with stylus cleaner and sit it down for a few seconds on my "Professional" brand buzz-o-rama battery-powered stylus cleaner. If I feel the need to give my stylus an extra pat on the head I’ll gently stroke it with an artists’ brush. In all my years, I’ve only accidentally ripped the needle/cantelever off a cartridge once or twice.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ve mentioned my various snafus before on this website. I’ve had a couple good scares when I’ve clumsily cued the cartridge down at a spot where it falls off the edge of the spinning record. I’m even less happy when I do this on a spinning 7" 45. Will it happily make it into the lead-in groove or will it scoot off onto my SOTA’s hard rubber turntable mat? Then there are the records where the lead-out groove is close enough to the label for the cartridge to scrape/bang against my LP hold-down clamp.