How do you clean for a living?
Humans are messy. We just are. We clean and mess and clean and mess... Quite a never-ending tug of war.
But if so, then how do we place our fellow humans (and ourselves) onto the scale from tidy to messy (or chaotic)? By the most-tidy-we-are when we're tidy? By the average? By the time we can hold “tidy” status before a decline to mess again?
Are we still talking about keeping a room tidy?
And have we ever? I'm not sure, there's so much clutter in this brain of ours.
You might be surprised – or you might not, in the end, it doesn't truly matter – to learn that I am a person with quite the swings, the ups and downs on the tidy-messy scale.
To me “comfort” includes the luxury of a relaxed attitude towards order in favour of living and breathing.
Until you freak out. A discomfort explosion when it gets too far.
I admit, that's a very good description. Today was such a day: In recent time, my life was rather fast and stressful, so my reaction was comfort in a certain leeway. Until today.
The day you couldn't stand it anymore. Come on, I was there. You wanted to clean up. You wanted to order and control and have some say in what you see, didn't you?
It became... ineffective. Order – after all – has its perks. I prefer cosy over sterile any day but knowing where things are provides... clarity.
And I had the time, I took the time, I started cleaning up, I grabbed something, a book maybe, and then George said
Uh nice, but what's the point? Today you put it from A to B so that next time you can put it back from B to A. Sounds very much like a metaphor for your life, doesn't it?
I didn't stop cleaning that moment but only continued in a kind of automatic mode. Did my self-talk just call my cleaning efforts futile and then compare them to the endeavour of ordering my life?
The comparison is pretty obvious if you ask me. You can move a lot without ever leaving a course. There is something called a “dynamic stability”: You are awake, you sleep, you are awake, you sleep. Repeating patterns.
I can't sleep all the time and neither can I constantly be awake. Both would be ridiculous. But that's not the point. The accusation of futility is what shocked me.
You will put it back from B to A. You won't like it there.
But then it's not cleaning, is it? It's parking.
Maybe that's bad, maybe it isn't. In any case, George is right, this “dynamic stability” is less “dynamic” than is sounds. You walk and walk and walk and walk and always come back to the same place. If you truly want to change something, you need to strike new paths first. And for that you can't continue relying on your old maps.
De-clutter some things, get a new shelf, throw away those old things.
But I might still use them one day. I can put them over there. Next to the box with my old electronic cables.
You're making it easy for me today, you know that?
I know.
Old answers lead to old outcomes. “Act like the person you want to become” they say. But what could that mean for me now? And when should I start? At messy or at tidy?
Do you see that book over there? Maybe future you would love to have it at a place C.
Next post: “Let's have a party”
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