Spring cleaning in September?

It began simply. Over Sunday lunch my mum was trying to tell visiting family members just what she’d done the previous day. However, she just couldn’t bring to her mind the words necessary to describe exactly what she had achieved. Sitting beside her I felt deep sympathy because I too have reached an age when perfectly simple words do not bubble up when you most need them. My mum adopted her usual approach, in these circumstances, she pointed out of the window and said “I painted the thing below the kitchen window outside”. The ‘thing’ of course was the windowsill. She had spent a happy hour painting the mucky grey windowsill a blistering white colour. In fact, this cleanness she had appreciated so much she had decided to paint another object white as well. Sitting at the table, I felt quite sorry for my mum when the word ‘windowsill’ wouldn’t come up and wanted to rush in and provide it. But I have learnt that when you start to talk for the person, though you think you’re helping, you’re actually sabotaging them. Longer term they start to cease using this tricky language business and rely on you more and more for translation purposes. However, having struggled to describe the windowsill paint job the other painted object was even trickier. I felt genuine sympathy as I couldn’t remember the name of the thing she had painted either. So, I explained, she had painted white the cement inside the tyre wheel holding up the post with the clothes hanging above it in the garden. I had forgotten the word ‘rotary washing line’. Such is life at present! Just when I begin to feel sorry that life is so confusing and tricky for my mum I discover that life has snuck up behind me and is proving equally problematic for me. This amuses my mum who often tells me triumphantly, “You become like the people you live with, you know!” It doesn’t stop with language quirks. Last week I discovered my mum has started spring cleaning. I should’ve guessed when the week before she started painting the windowsill. But to be honest it was only when she cleaned all the shelves in the sunroom and all the material on a nearby trolley and the windows that I suddenly tweaked that this spring clean was a real thing she had begun. I remonstrated with her that this is the end of September, no time to start a spring clean, but she smiled and said confidently, “Better early than late!” Since then she has gone on to tackle the kitchen cupboards, the large corridor storage cupboard and all the drawers. It is exhausting just watching her busily hauling out, cleaning and rearranging stuff. By the fourth day I was caught up in her wake and I started cleaning the bathroom even removing shower doors to do it properly. It is a contagious thing this spring cleaning. The problem is once you start you suddenly realise how dirty everything has become. In comparison to the sparking clean surface you have wiped, the tiles above it appear yellow and grease stained. Once the walls have been bleached into shiny submission the skirting boards take on a disgusting complexion. And so, it goes on! Having cleaned some tiny aspect of the house with much effort we both have a ridiculous evening show and tell session. She shows me what she has done, pulling open cupboard doors to display ordered shelves neatly stacked and I point out my cleaning achievements to her. I suspect with time this will grow into routine mutual applause at both our efforts. At first, I was annoyed especially when my mum was totally exhausted and stiff with pain after each cleaning frenzy but now I can see why she is enjoying it. There is a deep satisfaction from seeing the visible improvement around one. We catch each other examining our own work already done with a slightly smug air. There is a momentum developing and I hesitate to say it but we seem to be getting slightly better and try to raise our game with each passing day. There is also the deep satisfaction that this spring clean has got to be the earliest we have ever attempted. For once we feel we have a head start on life, after all it is months and months until spring. The other joyous discoveries are that you don’t need to know the name of something to clean it and we are gradually finding things we thought we lost. “It’s time for a spring cleaning of your thoughts, it’s time to stop to just existing it’s time to start living.” Steve Maraboli

Making Failure An Art Form - or falling with style

I have come to momentous moment in my life. At this stage, when there are no longer children around to focus on it is time to examine oneself with clarity.  To see where I have come from, where exactly I am now and hopefully to look forward to the path ahead. It is a eureka moment indeed to reflect on life. What one has achieved, or hasn’t.  What choices lead to which results. It looks a bit like an underground tube station map. There are main lines along which one has spent a disproportionate amount of energy and time. Then, there are the numerous dead ends. Lines that seem to beckon appealingly but end nowhere. Here are a few.

My unproductive knitting hobby. I never managed to finish single item. I even had a knitting machine with which I wrestled but produced nothing of value.  Looking back at primary school we had to knit a cushion cover. It took an entire year. Those were the days when the whole class would sit obediently knitting in complete silence for an hour a day. Educationalists would hold their heads in outrage at the waste of time it entailed.  The lack of academic content. Question the learning objectives and value of skills acquired. Point out the demanded silence was a form of abuse against talkative young eager minds. But if I'm honest I enjoyed knitting more than almost all my other classes.  There was a meditative silent stillness in the room. Just a click click of needles. You knew the task. The method was straightforward and when you returned to your work you could see visible progress each day. It achieved something. Your brain could find a stillness in the moment.  In the year, I almost finished my cushion cover. My tendency to knit tighter and tighter until the needles could barely get through the stitches meant I had a lot of ripping out and re-doing to do. My cushion cover which started almost a foot wide gradually narrowed down to 2/3 of its original width. This was disappointing but accepted as part of the journey. The knitting class became a metaphor for the rest of life. Sometimes you make a pigs ear out of things and have to go back to fix it. It's okay you get better each time you repeat something. Spotting a slip earlier rather than later helps. Missing a single stitch is not an option. You have to keep each and every one to have success. Don't waste time comparing your cushion cover with others. You'll be devastated by how far ahead they’ve got and what nicer colours they’ve chosen.  

My failed martial arts ability. Fuelled by movies I was convinced that I could get my black belt and go through life confident in every situation. It did make me fitter but I got no further than the yellow belt. That is not something one can boast or swagger about.  The kata were wonderful. I would go to an empty gym near my home and put on a cassette player (yes, that far back) and do the karate moves hypnotically until it felt as meditative as the knitting. I did not like spar fighting. It involves being punched and kicked and I was fearful of both. For some reason I was usually paired with a curly haired tough looking girl who would fight arms flailing like a paddle steamer round and round. It was impossible to block those blows as we been taught in karate and so I'd spend an inordinate amount of the fight running backwards around the mat. Fortunately, she wasn’t fit and usually ran out of steam before she could do me much harm. I learnt a lot. I do not like to be hurt and did not enjoy hurting others. So it was worth all the years of classes and is a somewhat valuable dead-end.

My inability to lose weight. I have kept diaries almost all my life and at the top from the very earliest I have recorded my weight in stones and pounds with despair. I look back at those weights with longing and wonder why on earth I obsessed about it.  If I knew then what I know now, I would have chilled out about being 10 stone. Now I dream of being under 11 stone. Elderly aunts used to say I had big bones, it drove me mad as an adolescent. I reckoned there were big dinosaur girls like me and other tiny fragile girls. I with my big bones obviously belong to the former group. These tiny birdlike aunts belonged to the latter category. I often broke things, handles off doors, cups, even windows and was terrified I might injure these elderly visitors with their matchstick arms, legs and necks. But they were tougher then they seemed and made me feel guilty and awkward. When today, I look at magazine covers of slim women staring out with razor cheekbones at slender bodies, I realise that such shapes are more appreciated than my broader lines. As a tall,sturdy, Yorkshire police woman friend of mine once moaned “if I'm reincarnated, I'm coming back as one of those butterfly women whose cases others have to carry!”  While there is genuine despair at the yearly expansion of quantity, regarding fat, perversely I'm infinitely grateful for being able to haul heavy gas cylinders up flights of stairs. After all quality (strength) trumps quantity (of fat content) every time.

My last dead end is an inner critical voice.   This strident voice has been heard echoing  through the decades. “You'll never pass, achieve or amount to anything!” How many initiatives died a death under the whithering machine gun of its cutting comments. Instead of pressing on to finish that knitting, get that black-belt or lose that weight I succumbed to that sneering tone of derision from within and gave up. If someone else voiced such hurtful jibes I'd respond with righteous contempt. But when that voice comes from deep inside your own brain your heart goes out of any enterprise. So having reflected on the past with clarity, my eureka moment was finding out that every path and turn has been plagued by an unnecessarily negative companion. As a dear friend Eleni announced when she returned from a weeks holiday in Paris with her husband. “He spent the whole time complaining about the price of coffee, bread, train tickets, taxis and the hotel room. As we walked down the Champs-Elysees, he whined about missing his own bed!”  She decided that this was the last holiday she would ever go with him. When I tried to remonstrate with her she became more emphatic.  “I mean it, if he's going to heaven I'm choosing hell. If he is going to Hell then I better be in heaven. In fact, heaven is going anywhere where he is not.” Her exasperation was excessive but she made a point that resonates.  So on careful reflection I’ve decided to be equally callous with my inner critic.  It is not a voice of humility nor does it provide an analytical perspective. It has to go! How to shut it up, is the tricky thing? At least, the direction ahead is clear. I'm excited about the future that could be mine, if like a stubborn nose polyp, this useless vocal appendage can be excised at last.