The Meaning of Cleaning
I keep hearing from friends that they’ve been ambitiously cleaning their homes from top to bottom since our stay-at-home order was put into place. The biggie seems to be cleaning out one’s closet: People are purging, organizing and color coordinating everything from blouses and belts, to jackets and jeans, and ridding themselves of those countless items that we swear to ourselves we’ll get back into at some point, or that should have been tossed out along with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.
Last weekend, a friend finally broke down from strictly adhering to the social distancing orders, and drove an hour and a half to pick up her sorely missed granddaughters, and then drove them back to her house for an all-girl weekend of pizza-eating, movie-watching and spring-cleaning. I figured that she figured it was either break the shelter in place order and go get her much-needed grandchildren fix, or have madness descend upon her like a dark and lonely cloak. She opted to keep her sanity and spent time with her beloved teens, some of which was spent organizing her closets. She said that by the time they were done, if they’d attached price tags to each item, you’d have sworn you were walking through Macy’s, or had jumped right through the TV screen and landed on the set of QVC. She took pictures for posterity sake.
The other day, while my husband shampooed our carpet, I cleaned out my office desk. Now, one would wonder how hard and time consuming the latter of those tasks could be. Well, it took the better part of the morning, and the things that I found in and amongst all the necessary and usual office items would most certainly have been of great interest to entomologists, as well as the appraisers on the Antiques Road Show. In the end, my freshly sharpened #2 pencils were lined up in their tray, and every stray rubber band and paperclip had found its proper home in their thoroughly cleansed plastic boxes. As I stared into my top drawer, admiring my neat little row of scotch tape and White-Out, it suddenly occurred to me why we’re all in a cleaning frenzy. I believe it goes well beyond the reason that we finally have the time to do it, or that we’re bored enough to do it. I believe we’re doing it as a subconscious way of readying ourselves for a fresh new start, and one way of doing that is to become unencumbered by those things that no longer work for us.
As we slowly begin returning to some semblance of normalcy, I think we want to get back out into the world feeling as polished and primed as possible. It reminds me of starting a new school year when I made sure I had just the right outfits to wear and made room for them by giving away those pieces I’d outgrown. I also tossed out old notebooks and replaced them with new ones. Somehow, by starting out the school year that way, I felt a certain confidence that I was as prepared as possible, and that the year ahead was a clean slate that was waiting to be filled, just like the empty pages in my notebooks. I can’t help but think that subconsciously we’re doing the same thing today as we throw out the old and make room for the new in our own little personal corners of the world. Maybe by doing so, it makes us feel a little more in control of…well…something, and better prepared to meet head-on whatever new world awaits us out there, even if it does seem like one gigantic messy closet for awhile.