It's a great time to...

Clean House

“If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter cold resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you.”

Elizabeth Gilbert

          It occurs to me that this virus-related isolation that we’re all going through is a very good time to clean house—externally and internally. There’s actually a very good chance that those two things are related; at least they are for me. It’s time for spring cleaning anyway, so why not, while we’re wiping down doorknobs and car handles, do a little internal clean-up, too.

          I hear you protesting—or maybe that’s me protesting—but here’s the thing: our psychological freedom requires it. Can you imagine how much holding onto resentments and angry feelings of blame hold you back? It’s like hauling around boxes of rocks. They require constant care and attention. Often, we must revive them, juice them back up, and rake ourselves through all that nastiness again just to keep them alive. What’s the good of that? It takes a lot of time and energy.

          I don’t know about you, but I’m not leaving my house right now to take a trip anywhere beyond the Piggly Wiggly. I can, however, take a trip down memory lane and see what’s still lurking there that might be a bugaboo for me. That nasty lie someone told about me in high school, the time Dennis (somebody, can’t even remember his name) slapped me in eighth grade, when my ex-husband brought his new 30-yr-old girlfriend around to meet me—still lingering kernels of resentment. Let them go. Give each one an image, like a bird released from a cage (or your hands) that flies high into the sky and out of sight as quickly as possible. And while you’re letting go of your bad feelings about others, let yourself off that meat-hook too. You’ve made some stupid mistakes, so have I, so has everybody. You must let go of blaming and shaming yourself for them sometime. So why not now?

          When we let go of our past transgressions and everyone else’s, we feel light as air. We find it much easier to take that journey, to meet our present and our future, to look our teachers in the eye, and to greet new people as well as old friends at a different level. We are wiser, less guarded, less arrogant, and more accepting of ourselves and others. Sounds good, doesn’t it? So, pick up that broom and get going.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane