Not to bore the men around here, but this, my third pregnancy, has been a tougher go around. I haven’t quite been able to narrow down the root cause(s), although I’m making headway; it’s likely some combination of nutritional deficiencies, increased responsibilities, and the unending need for further interior healing (what the real interior life is all about). I’m still relatively young to be bearing children (according to contemporary standards at least), so I had higher hopes; I guess I’m learning again that humility may be holy, but it isn’t fun—and really only works if you let it. In any case, there have been more than a few days overtaken by valleys of physical and emotional weakness.
Strangely enough, in these vulnerable moments when you’d think anything related to housekeeping would send me into the ravine, I’ve found that cleaning my house helps. The work of dusting, sweeping, vacuuming, tidying up draws me out of myself, and I am suddenly improving the space around me, giving cleanliness and beauty to my family or future guests. As my conscious mind is able to rest and my subconscious to work through the movements of the chores, my thoughts begin to take on some order as well. I find myself and my home lifted a little.
We are discovering more and more about the dynamic relationship between our interior lives and the spaces around us, just as we learn that our bodies are, in a sense, our subconscious minds, storing emotions and experiences and memories, affecting our thoughts in turn. In this way, when, after turning in desperation to cleaning, I found myself refreshed, I wasn’t surprised. The world inside me felt a mess, and by cleaning the world without, I found some restoration within.
I’ve wondered if we might all benefit from engaging with our spaces in this way—a purgative way. We get to clear out, to clarify. Interiorly, we feel it as well. And although the etymology of “purgative” might carry some unpleasant suggestions, for the religious, it represents a cleansing, a purification, a preparing. Life is a constant return to this process: Make way for the new.
Some of us may have given away the work of cleaning to a spouse or a housecleaner, or we do it begrudgingly, and I think we forfeit an important human thing. (Also, there might be an argument to be made about making time for cleaning, despite a busy schedule—that it is a part of one’s personal responsibility for the place he or she inhabits.) Building up stuff and grime and then engaging in the work of cleaning it out somehow seems a basic part of relating to one’s environment. It’s not just that the cleaning gets done but that you are the one to do it.
On a broader scale, tidying up is often the first step to creating a beautiful space. When I look at “befores” and “afters,” I’m sometimes struck by the amount of purging and cleaning that definitely happened before the renovating could. These are among the surest ways to immediately enhance our surroundings. They are also always budget friendly. Before you start your next home improvement project, I’d recommend just making sure your house is clean and orderly.
Get rid of the dust and the extra stuff (the things you haven’t looked at in a while or look at with regret). You’ll feel more space inside. Even those hidden places—desk drawers, file cabinets, closets, tool benches—might have become burdensome. Get to them too. For me, it’s not always only a long build-up of things but a short-term one: shoes that need homes, papers that can be recycled, cabinets and baseboards that need a good wipe, sneaky cobwebs in the corners.
My resolution is this: To support my mental and emotional health, I need to do a bit of hands-on cleaning every day. (I noticed that the valleys followed on a few days of not getting to it.) Whether it’s in dusting the living room, cleaning a bathroom, de-cluttering a closet, or ensuring that our family gets to our traditional evening house cleanup (all spaces restored to good order), I’m betting I’ll keep finding relief.
And interestingly, the work is never finished. The dirt comes again just like the seasons. Cleaning it up faithfully each time is something akin to the healing nature of sickness, to the potentially restorative nature of a child’s meltdown.
In closing, please don’t find here another piece about the blissful glories of female domestic life. I find it only occasionally blissful and rarely glorious. It’s mostly grit and courage that get us through, and regular cleaning takes more discipline than anything. My husband unashamedly finds deep cleans and organization satisfying as well—another sign that this purgative work should not be exclusively assigned to women.
Most of us likely want to feel more at home in our houses, more at home in ourselves. Even with an entirely content interior life, any person will grow from relating to his or her environment with renewed humility, detachment, strength, and love—virtues that also come about with a dust cloth in hand.
Well said. I find that if I have a day that I do major cleaning each week the rest of my week fall into place better.