Fall Cleaning

I am in the throws of a major clean sweep. I failed to identify in past years that this is a fairly seasonal thing for me. Regardless of the trigger, several times a year I am struck the the urge to purge and I go after my house with renewed fervor and determination to straighten, tidy, dust, eliminate, organize, separate and toss. It is a very bad time to sit still in my house. One would find ones self in the dumpster if one were not exceedingly careful. Several family members have confessed fear this will happen anyway.

I have been working for several days now sorting and straightening and opening cabinets and tossing unnecessary accumulation. Some people call this their clothing, but if you needed it, I think you should be wearing it. I love the way the place looks and feels when you are finished. It's just delightful and smells so good. It makes you awfully tired and sore and slightly grumpy while cleaning, I think. However, it is very worth it when you stand back and marvel at how good the place can look with proper attention.

My friend Jeanie lives like this. She is always organizing and straightening and cleaning and dusting. She keeps things straight all the time, she probably has never had the urge to purge. She is a continual purger. I admire that quality. I need things to be clean myself, but I can, if not watched very closely, become a piler. Yes, I know, this is a very public forum for such a personal confession, but it's true. If I get busy running the world, which you know takes up most of my time, I often lay things I need to do together in a nice neat pile and put them aside until after the crisis with the world has resolved. Then, because of the reproductive nature of items piled together, my pile grows. Other people, mistaking my neat organized pile for a generic, run of the mill pile, add their things to the mix. There is nothing more fatiguing in the world than pile separation. So I put off dealing with it until enough people have added things to the pile that I can do nothing else but wait until a week or two has passed, figure we didn't really need anything in that pile anyway and throw it away. (Sorry to all you folks still waiting for an answer to a letter or a bill to be paid.)

I have sadly noticed that I have this tendency to do the same thing spiritually. I tend to make a pile of books I will one day read, journals I will one day write in, prayers I will pray, conversations I will have, worship I will investigate, papers I will write. People tend to add a few things to my pile, books they would like me to read, people I should pray for and so on. And so, you know what I do. I don't throw the stack away but I move it to the bookshelf in the basement in the back of the office supply closet for a rainy day. Should we ever have a monsoon, I will find plenty to do while we are drying out.

So, I am trying hard to adopt my friend Jeanie's philosophy. Don't set it down, take care of it now. Don't pile it, file it. Do today's stuff today and if I can't I have probably put too much stuff in today again. When I have let things get away from me, I need to dig back out, one section at a time. Here I am back to eating the elephant, one bite at a time. Have you noticed how big elephants are, by the way???

My friend Nancy stopped by yesterday. Told me she had spent all morning at a de-cluttering class. I asked her to tell me what she learned. She said it was really easy, just quit shopping. Please. Why do they bother to teach such heresy?