Letting Go

So I cleaned some of my house today. I really don't enjoy housecleaning at all but then again, I don't enjoy living in squalor and filth either and I do love that feeling of the way a clean house smells good and shines. I may hate the process, but I do love the results.

The hardest part of cleaning, for me, isn't the scrubbing or mopping or sweeping or dusting. No, it's getting rid of the accumulated clutter so that I can sweep and mop and dust and scrub. I'll pick up one of those little bottles of hotel shampoo and think, "Someone could use this."

Well, yes, someone could, but no, no one is ever going to. And then I THROW IT AWAY! And all its little cousins, too, the hair conditioner that doesn't really condition and the hand and body lotion that smells like something you could eat but that wouldn't really be good for you even if it was food. Into the trash bag it all goes and boy, does that feel good.

Other things are harder to throw away and I won't list them here. They probably differ for all of us. But the question is, why do we hang on to these things that aren't enriching our lives one bit and in fact, make our lives more difficult and messy? It's all just useless stuff that is really nothing more than garbage that we don't need and would be better off for having gotten rid of.

I remember once a friend of mine who knew she really didn't have long to live attended the birth of another friend. I was there, working at the Birth Center, and it was a difficult and potentially perilous birth but it all turned out quite well and after the baby was born and everything was fine, my friend was lying on a couch in the dark and I came in and asked her if she was okay.

"I'm fine," she said, even though she was crying. And then she said something I'll never forget. "We all carry around so much garbage. And the damn thing about it is that so much of it isn't even ours to begin with."

She was right. And I think about that when I clean house. That it's not just the stupid things we hang on to that make our lives more difficult and messy than they should be but the stuff we carry around inside that we don't need and perhaps isn't even ours to carry anyway.

I think a lot of this garbage is stuff we were taught as children by perhaps well-meaning adults: the bitter and burnt-out teachers, the preachers and Sunday school teachers, the parents with deep and disturbing issues of their own. They all heaped crap on us we didn't need and wasn't true, and yet that we somehow ended up internalizing and believing as truth.

Things like the belief that we weren't smart enough or pretty enough or that we had no talent for art or that we were supposed to be selfless caretakers or that suffering is noble or that we weren't supposed to act silly or that we weren't supposed to enjoy sex or that we had to put up with horrible evil things that no one on this earth should have to put up with.

Or even that we should eat liver.

I don't know.

But at some point, wouldn't it be grand if we could just recognize that garbage for what it is and see clearly how much of our energy we are wasting by carrying it around and then...just let it go?

What a relief that would be. Far, far greater than the relief that comes with tossing out all those little bottles of shampoo, I can tell you that.

How much easier it would be to let our souls shine if we could rip down and burn the curtains made up of the rotten fabric of guilt and habit and fear that we've cloaked and choked ourselves with our entire lives?

I hope I don't have to wait until I know I'm dying to do that.

Spring is coming on, which is the traditional time to clean and sort and toss.

And just like housecleaning, I doubt that soul-cleaning is a task that ever gets entirely completed but dammit, I'm going to try and get at least one or two rooms cleared out.

I'm going to try and recognize and let go of the things I've been keeping that are holding me back, even if guilt and fear and habit make it hard to do.

Not just let go, but get rid of forever. Make a big old metaphoric burn pile and light the match.
And then get on with my life. My cleaner, shinier, less cluttered life.

My one and only real true life. The one I'm living now.