Spring Cleaning

The tradition of Spring Cleaning has always worked for me, even though I don't carry it to the extremes I've read in novels of earlier times, when women (NEVER men) scoured everything in and out of sight, beat rugs on clotheslines, and thoroughly cleaned every area of their homes (although I have been known to tap my small throw rugs against the front porch railing...). That approach to cleaning has, I trust, gone the way of the dodo bird and the disenfranchisement of women.

 

Nonetheless, there is much to be said for an annual, or semi-annual, tackling of areas in our homes that are not used much and that serve as repositories for 'stuff'. I know the satisfaction I feel when I actually do a proper cleaning on a Saturday - such as last week, when I dusted the living room and dining room and rearranged plants and flowers to gain the most from the beautiful sunshine coming through the (dirty) windows. Imagine the satisfaction to be gained if I were to clean the hall closets and sort through the debris in the catch-all bottom drawer in my office/dressing room or, even more exciting to contemplate, both drawers in my office filing cabinet.

And yet, like many people, I often consider, but do not take, action. I have wondered about that procrastination - in fact, I think it worthy of its own post - I wonder if we get some benefit from not doing something that we know/think we should. Maybe that's the rub - the ubiquitous shoulds in our lives. When I think of spring cleaning - the kind practised, at least in my social group, no more - I think the motivation was more to subscribe to social norms of the day. Now we don't measure our friends' worth by the level of the cleanliness and tidiness of their homes, and if 'keeping up with the Joneses' means spending hours on our hands and knees scrubbing, etc., we opt out.

Having said that, I am about to embark on a Spring Cleaning of one kind: I intend in the next few months to declutter. We are going to be moving out of this house and into something smaller, probably a townhouse, and we have too much 'stuff'. I have moved, way too many times, things that are not useful, needed, beautiful, or remotely interesting. It's time I made a move (pun intended). I have boxes of negatives that have travelled with me since the 70's. I have books that I will never read again (and believe me, books are for me cherished objects) and even some that I have never read....There is sporting equipment for activities that would result in severe physical damage if I were to actually partake of them; there are coats and jackets that I will never wear again....Like many people, I have tended to hang on to things that I don't need and cannot justify paying someone to move, again.

It's time to move towards that zen lightness of living that I so admire. I have decluttered before; this time, I will cut deeper. I truly believe that to rid ourselves of extraneous physical 'stuff' is to rid ourselves of an excess weight of the mind, and I want to be lighter.

Maybe the spring-cleaning women of the 20th century were clearing out internal cobwebs along with the external ones.

I'll see how well I do.