Counting All The Pennies

The thing about all the prettiness in the movie we watched is that the teeth were incredibly mesmerizing.  All of them.  The yellow ones, the yellow crooked ones, the white crooked ones, the straight white ones, the ones with the gorgeous symmetry between incisors and front teeth...Mathew Fox wouldn't be nearly so handsome if it weren't for that tooth that pushes forward slightly.  If he ever gets his teeth Hollywood straightened he will lose his appeal. 

That was an aside.  I was going to mention the value of taking care of as many of the small stressors in your life that you can because they can add up to a lot.  Things that aren't organized well in your home can make a morning run rough.  Not having a place for everything means that everything hangs out in piles on top of other things.  Broken things: loose door knobs, missing weather stripping, leaky showers, not enough jars for dry goods, tightly packed kitchen cupboards...all these things add stress to our lives because they prevent our lives from running smoothly.  If we can't find the things we need, the socks never make it into the sock drawer, or if we can't find the brown sugar which is buried under the bags of lentils and polenta which don't have jars...we run late for everything while we look for the socks or we spend more money and time procuring things we already have because we can't see that they're already in front of us.

I have found that my house reflects the state of my mind and my life and it also creates my state of mind and my state of life.  They are inextricably intertwined.  I have chaos all over my house.  This is how the interior of my mind looks and feels these days.  Then last week end I asked Philip and Max to clean the living room because I need more help with the household stuff- I used to do it all when I wasn't working for pay- but now that I work around 30 hours a week I just can't do it all by myself.  They did it.  They did a great job of it. 

I can't describe to you what it felt like to sit in that living room with my guys watching a movie together in such a clean and pretty room.  It felt deeper than just clean, it felt restful and almost like having a chamber of my mind also cleared.  My stress decreased, my enjoyment of my family increased, and my home felt, in that one clean room, like the nurturing place I knew it could be when I first walked into it.

I liked it when we had a smaller house.  It was easier to keep neat and tidy.  Not that I'm ever a tidy person.  But there is a surprisingly huge difference between cleaning a 1200 square foot house and a 1900 square foot house.  This house is hard to keep in any kind of decent clean shape.  It wouldn't be so hard if I actually spent the time to organize everything.  When everything has a place it is much faster to clean a house- to put things away.  Much less daunting. 

I personally dislike homes that are too clean and neat.  They make me feel uncomfortable.  Houses I can't wear my shoes through, or in which I can't bring a beverage out of the kitchen, or a home in which dishes are always washed right after dinner- homes like that make me feel like an unwelcome dirty intruder.  So my house will never be like that. 

What I want is balance.  I want my house to be more organized than it is so that I can keep the chaos to a manageable minimum.  Not so clean that I don't feel I can actually live in it, but clean enough that I am not oppressed by piles and animal hairs everywhere, and bits of string and corks- I don't want my house to look as trashed as the streets of Paris on the first day of the year 2000.  Which it often does.

The process is gradual and slow for me- getting a house organized.   It took me three years at the Pink house in Santa Rosa.  Three years.  By that time I could clean my whole house in two hours.  Laundry would still take all day but I could put a week's worth of living away, clean the bathroom, change the sheets, clean the kitchen, sweep, vacuum, mop, and dust.  In two hours.

In this house it takes me two hours to deal with one room. 

It's important to take small steps.  The living room was cleaned last week and if my guys clean it this week it will take them a quarter of the time it took them last week.  I am going to ask them to do it again.  If we can keep one room clean every single week that's an accomplishment.  Then if I can get another one done, and then keep that one clean every week, we'll really be getting somewhere!

If you are feeling overwhelmed with your life, like I am, I suggest you clean one room this weekend.  Really organize and clean it.  Decide where everything in that one room goes so that next week you can zip through and just put things away instead of having to figure it all out each time.  Or if you have little things around the house that are nagging at your brain and you feel overwhelmed by how many there are- pick one.  Do it.

I promise that the little things in life always add up.  Both the bad and the good.  One penny may seem worthless to some people, but when you get a hundred of them they become a dollar.  Even in this lousy economy where a loaf of good bread* costs almost $5 most people wouldn't leave a dollar on the ground like they would a penny.  The pennies are everywhere you go and if you pick them up they will add up to something more. 

This is something Max understands.  This is something most kids understand.  Adults forget how to add the good little things up.  I notice that we're pretty damn good at adding up all the bad things: petty regrets, insults, misfortunes, anger, losses, and failures.  What about all the small good things our lives are full of like: little apologies, forgiveness, triumphs, acts of self discipline, and working toilets.

Today I'm going to replace the weather stripping on my kitchen door through which I can see the daylight streaming in.  It's not much but it's one less place the icy cold air of winter can blow into our cozy house.

What small thing are you going to do to make your life better today?





*Crappy bread will always be cheap and always be crappy.