Slow and steady is too... slow for me. And when I engage in marathon sessions of reorganizing and cleaning I run out of steam and leave things half done and everyone is much worse off than they were in the first place. So now I am engaging in interval training for household maintenance and systems analysis. Periods of intense reorganization followed by slow, steady decluttering. And some rest. Actually I am not really doing interval training properly. Its really more like the Swedish version which is called-- and I am not making this up-- fartlek training. (At this point my spouse would point out that I taught junior high for too long.) It's less regimented, but still involves variable speeds and intensitiies to build endurance. ...and it has taken me all day to get back to this post because I have spent the entire aftenoon
When I triaged the house today I determined that the children's room was in the most danger of becoming an independent life form and swallowing the family if extraordinary measures were not employed. Pitchforks. Forklifts. Dumpsters. Possibly I am exaggerating. But there were crumpled newspapers gathered by the heat register just waiting for us to turn on the furnace. Menacing. I did manage to find a number of long-lost library books. And I found all of your missing socks. You know, the ones that disappear under mysterious circumstances? It turns out that the space between the bunkbed and the wall in the children's bedroom is the bermuda triangle of socks. In the course of this marathon re-invention of living space I was brutal with the well-hidden boxes of things packed away for years-- unseen and unmourned. I will not hang on to cheap plastic things or swag picked up from county fairs. I have realized that I do not fix toys. I do not find all the pieces to incomplete puzzles. I feel a little bit guilty, but the rewards of having usable living space is well worth it. These broken unwanted things turn out to be just like my now-defunct fossilized box of mending. I once kept clothes that needed repairs for so long that they came back into style. Those can go. So can the lonely socks. And the really horrible photographs (unidentifiable shadowy blurs taken with film cameras in the 1990s). Grateful Crap: Very appreciative children (for the most part) happy to be reunited with their hardwood floor. Daily Convexions: took meds in morning (150mg sertraline, 450mg bupropion) engaged in aerobic cleaning note: oldest son remarked that he has noticed a difference in my memory from the past year to now. That I am recalling things now that I was completely fuzzy on earlier in the year. And he has perfect recall for EVERYTHING so I believe him. Comments are closed.
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K. BuchananQuaker, teacher, parent, |