Some days are all about taking care of business. While my fiancé prepped and prepared dinner dishes for our guests tonight, I cleaned, dusting spots I hadn’t dusted in quite a while, I must admit. I don’t mind everyday, routine cleaning, but dusting is my least favorite part, so it gets neglected in the grand scheme of home care. The one great thing about cleaning is that at the end of the day, you can really see your results, and it always feels worth the effort, unlike so many daily tasks that we cross off our lists to which there are no tangible results.
Even at work, when I clean my office or reorganize and clean out materials that have long piled up with no place to go, I feel I have accomplished more than a whole week’s worth of editing electronic documents or even helping the same children get to sleep every day at nap time or pushing them on the swings during outside time. It’s not that these are unimportant tasks in my job; it’s just that you don’t look around you and feel the immediate results like you do with a previous disorganized or dusty space now shiny, clean, and spacious! I don’t get to see how much more well behaved the children are for their parents at home after a good nap at school because I helped them get to sleep. I don’t hear feedback from the community on how well written the documents that come out of my department are because I have helped edit them or have worked hard on writing, revising, rewriting, and finalizing my own newsletters and such, but I do feel the smooth, freshly swept and mopped floor under my feet, no longer stepping on bits of sand or debris tracked in from outside. I do smell the fresh scents of a clean home as I walk through it. I do see the organization on the desks and in the rooms of the home, and it makes me feel more calm and peaceful.
It’s funny how cleaning can affect me that way. I guess that’s why I’ve never minded it so much because it brings order to my busy life. It brings order even when there’s chaos in everything else going on around me or inside me. I used to go right to the sink when I felt tears coming on from a difficult day, when I was battling with bouts of depression during the crumbling of my family life in the last years of my marriage. Washing the dishes by hand with the warm soap suds running through my fingers soothed me, and when I was done, I had accomplished something I could see, something that kept life moving, something that proved I was alive and could hold it all together and keep going no matter what. I was NOT just sitting in bed wasting away even if that was what I sometimes felt like doing. I was busy taking care of business, and what better way to stay out of the dumps than to get moving. Thank goodness most of my cleaning now is simply because it needs to be done, not because I’m trying to keep myself my falling apart or to soothe hurting emotions, but it still has the same calming, and in a sense, uplifting effect on me. I guess we all have something like that in our lives, that keeps us sane. It’s nice to be aware of what that sanity check is for me. I think it might be cooking for my fiancé...what is it for you?
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