The gang arrives for the holiday weekend tonight. This morning finds their room still filled with all the stuff I couldn’t find a place for when redoing an upstairs room. The dining room is littered with the mess from redoing the downstairs bedroom. The bathrooms need attention and then there’s the floors. I could feel the anxiety building, so about 8:30 am I decided I’d best get to it.
I was washing the kitchen counter and the back and forth motion of the cloth took me back to the years of other counters I washed this very same way. I started thinking, how many times have I done the same household tasks as I was embarking on today across 36 years and four houses? I remember those Saturday mornings in our first house back in NY washing almost the same kind of counter. I would be hard at work, moving briskly toward the hour when it all would be done and I could relax and appreciate the job well-done. Today it dawned on me: I’m still doing the same jobs and realized it’s never going to be all done. I’ll be doing the same thing a month from now for the next holiday. I’ll be washing this same counter tomorrow morning and the next morning after that.
Instead of overwhelming me more, I was amazed to find comfort in these thoughts. I looked around the kitchen and saw all the other bigger projects that still needed to be done, such as move and clean behind the refrigerator and stove, as well as empty and clean all the cabinets. When I went to put the sheets in the washer I looked at the basement and saw it, too, needed another good cleaning and reorganization. I realized that’s the stuff of life. There is no day when it’s all going to be done. That day I waited for all these years never came. Each house comes with its own living and breathing needs, almost like a child does. The comforting moment in all this came with the realization that there is no reason to hurry. There is no deadline. The house will be neat and clean enough to house the gang for the weekend, but all that needs to be done will always be there. There is no list that I can cross the jobs off of and complete. The house, like the children who live there, grow older, but never “grow done”.
All of a sudden the pressure of having to be “done and ready” by tonight dissipated. I turned up the music and danced through the morning with the vacuum cleaner. Seeing my day as part of a linear ride rather than a vertical climb, greatly relieved the stress of the moment.
And so, once again, change your thoughts, change your mind, change your life rings true, sometimes it takes the mundane and simple tasks to teach us, and….I have written.
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