Deep Cleaning

It’s been almost 3 weeks since I’ve written, and not because I have nothing to say. I’ve been cleaning. If you saw my house at the moment you’d laugh hysterically and wonder what I’m talking about. Seriously cleaning. Cleaning up my ideas and my thoughts and priorities… or at least, that’s what I’ve been trying to do, with little progress. Regardless of mental or emotional or physical surrounding cleaning, I always find myself with a bigger mess at the end of the day than when I started. I need a new plan, a new strategy.

This is how cleaning works for me… I set out to clean one little cabinet. No big deal. It’s 4 shelves tall and only 12″x12″ deep. this kind of project should take an average person, maybe an hour. For me, this takes months. I pull everything out and as I do I find things I forget I had. “Oh look, there’s those beads I bought last spring”. Which then turns into my remembering the projects I want to do. “I should dig out my other beads and make a few of those bracelets before the weekend”. So then I go hunting for pieces of things I know I will need “before I forget”. In the hunting process I find things I was looking for yesterday along with more things I forgot I wanted to do something with. Occassionally I’ll actually find what I set out to find, but probably less often than I’d like. By the end of the day, I’ve found 4 new things, remembered 10 new things, brainstormed 20 new ideas and the cabinet is now spread across the entire kitchen table and the counter.

So what happens when the mess is overtaking the kitchen?

If my family is going to eat, I need to clean up quick, so I usually stash everything (old and newly collected items) back into the cabinet. OR, if I am really determinded to clean up, I’ll grab a box and dump everything in it.. only to store on a shelf somewhere else.

This is exactly how my mind cleaning works as well. I set out to focus on one thing, start looking at the details which reminds me of other topics… so then I sit and ponder the pieces and parts I need to remember. By the end of the day I’ve completely forgotten the first focus only to have rediscovered, brainstormed freshly today and sparked more brain clutter for me to sift through later. I then have to just dump it all into a “gotta remember this later” box and continue on with the path of the day.

So when does this cycle end? When I finally find something of interest and importance enough to focus and finish. Even then, the cycles only ends for that one thing… and then it starts all over again.

There are numerous people that have commented over the years “gosh Jen, you do so much… how do you do it all?”

Reread that path above… while you hang upside down from your chair, trying to drink pink lemonade from a straw  and whistling any number of kid themed songs…

No coffee or soda… it’s 100% me – A Happy Pig.