Behind closed doors.
Good morning,
If you want a feeling of power and control clean a cupboard. It is as much control as most of us ever get anyway. Don't seek it anywhere else. You have it at your fingertips.
I am not a cleaner of cupboards. I have junk. Bits and pieces of things that pile in a drawer. But I am making an effort to bring some order to my house, and with it comes this great feeling of accomplishment. I liken it to finishing a rug. Wow. Look what I did.
Sometimes when things go haywire, when the news is too hard to watch, or things feel a little too much just take everything out of a bin, or a cupboard and pitch or give away the unnecessary. I spend half a day lately cleaning out the cupboards in my studio. After that I tackled my sewing drawer with the collection of odd buttons and a myriad of threads and needles.
What do you do with your pennies now? Once I used to collect and roll them. I save them because I imagine some artist somewhere is going find a creative use for them and need thousands of them. I still have a few hundred.
I took my time and I persisted most of the rainy afternoon. And I got things done. I sorted through too many pens and pencils, paper clips, gift wrap. Bits of string, boxes of papers, old computer discs. I recycled, and gave away what I could. Some of these things had not been looked at since 2012. Yup, there were dates. Why is the question? What was I keeping them for?
I was keeping them because it was the path of least resistance I suppose. There they were hidden in a cupboard. I barely knew they were there. But I knew. I knew that underneath those cupboards there was something that was luring me in. I knew there was wasted space and lost nothings. It hung over me.
And now that I have tackled it, I feel like there was something lifted off my mind. When I look at those shut doors, I think I know what's in there and it feels good. The tools have reacquainted themselves, the tripod parts have remarried. The batteries have a home.
And I feel good. Because I spent an afternoon in my own company listening to Ann Vogels, What to Read Next Podcast, and little bit of Bruce Springsteen as I made space and organized and got things the way I wanted.
And when I look back on doing that I see that I had some control over where things go, and how things should be, and that energized me. Cause control over where to put the pencils, is about as much control as I have come to expect. I don't mean that in a throw up your hands kinda way. I mean it with all the humility I can muster. So much is going on in the world. So much is going on with all of us. Sometimes the best thing you can do is tackle a cupboard.
Now I am thinking of one other cupboard that needs a blessing, a brainstorm, and a digging out. Will there always be a cupboard that taunts me, or some day will it all be neat and tidy behind the closed doors of this very very old house?
Thanks for reading. I am so glad you do.
Deanne
- Deanne Fitzpatrick
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