Cleaning room

Over the past several weeks, I have been gradually cleaning my room at home. Let me tell you, it needed a cleaning year's ago, but now at last it has begun, so there.

It's been helpful not to try and tackle the whole project in one great effort, but to make headway each day. In that regard at least, cleaning a very messy room is like marathon training. The end result of cleaning a room, however, is a clean room, or so you hope, whereas with marathon training the end result is often a race. Things don't always turn out as you expect.

Digging through a room not cleaned since the Stone Age can yield a number of interesting finds. I found a book I wrote in 7th grade about renewable energy. I was really into the idea of renewable energy back then, as I am now, and so when an assignment came around about writing a little book for class, I decided that would be the topic of the book. Imagine that.

I also keep uncovering stashes of money, large and small. It seems I started saving money over a dozen times in the last fifteen years, and each time the stash found itself buried under something. In deeming the previous savings lost, I began a new collection, and so on and so forth. Now I keep finding coins all over the place. Usually it is a few dollars in change, though that can mean several hundred pennies in certain cases. Hard to say how much will come to the surface when it's all over, but if you haven't cleaned a room in  a while, you might that you own a lot more money than you think.

Of course, you also find that you own a lot more stuff that you quite possible ever imagined. In a mere preliminary sweep of two desk drawers this morning, I probably found close to 400 pens, pencils, colored pencils, and markers. No joke. I separated them into piles, feeling like a weapons inspector trying to tabulate how many of this and that whiz-bang such-and-such had hidden. Finding a home for them could be difficult. 

Finally, I've discovered that it is possible to make progress. This project probably began three weeks ago, and the place is still a mess, but let me tell you, real progress has been made. And you know what, I feel better knowing that I'm doing something good not only for myself, but for the house in general. It is far too easy to get inundated with stuff in a society that values consumption. You don't have to abide by the value, but it's easy to get caught up in it if you've got a job. Some folks talk about a house's "carbon footprint" to denote how much pollution a house produces on average, but perhaps we should also talk about a house's "foot-print foot-print," measured by how much stuff the house is housing. Sounds silly, but let me tell you, a house full of stuff can drive a person mad, and we probably don't need anymore things in our modern, technological world with the potential to drive people mad. 

So I will keep cleaning room, one day at a time. It has good potential to be a happy place, and while I don't expect to live there more than another year, it would be a nice parting gift to my loving family to leave them a clean room. Such a gift is worth a lot these days. 

Happy Tuesday friends :)