The Smell of Settling

I love cleaning. I know that sounds wierd and if you talked to Ang she would remind you that "we have a different definition of clean". But I really like to clean or better yet maybe I like to organize and straighten things up. As a guy I love to clean the garage, a room (not technically) that most don't care much to mess with. It's a place to park the cars or possibly to keep all the crap we don't know what else to do with. Others use basements, spare rooms, storage units and on a small scale that preverbial "junk" drawer full of all the stuff we don't know when we might need and yet can't ever find when we do need.

I've found that I've been happiest when I have a big garage. In Quincy we had this nice home with a extra house/garage complete with a heater and cabinets and it was glorious. It was a homebase for weight lifting (that one time when I did that), a place to cool off after hours and hours of basketball and even a place I had some pretty significant conversations. In Colorado we had one of those new "double" garages which technically can park two cars but only if you own a Kia or some other midget car. No healthy human can actually park in there and get out without stealing a couple moves from Houdini. There were some shelves (nice ones albeit) and we stored some stuff but to do anything in the garage it meant moving something else. Now we again have a healthy garage. One that holds things, you can actually park our cars in and a place where I love to clean and organize. Its about time for some new shelves and I find myself periodically going through what we own and consolidating and throwing away. At times I throw away things that later are necessary (ie. Christmas decorations, other decorations, mainly anything my lovely wife might need but never anything I want--not that it actually has happened but it could.....) but for the most part its quite a nice place.

Part of what makes it so nice right now is what happened a few months ago. For some strange reason Ang and I got this bee in our preverbial bonnet to clean. We'd been in Colorado for a while and weren't planning on going anywhere in the near future but we were tired of all the garbage. It wasn't really garbage, it was just stuff everywhere. Most of it had moved with us from Quincy and was in boxes--some of which had never been opened. We started using whatever extra room was in our garbage can each week to throw stuff out. We made up rules like if we haven't used it or needed it since we got here it goes. Turns out our move to Joplin was much easier because we didn't have to take all sorts of misc. junk with us.

What really made me think was when I'd talk to people about this experience they'd tell me they too had stuff sitting everywhere. Half of this, a part of this, these old things with no real value, just too nice to get rid of. And we all had/have boxes of junk. I remember opening some boxes in the garage in Colorado and not finding a single thing of value or even one thing worth keeping. Yet the box had been sitting there for months, just taking up space. All said and done we turned a house full of things into a box or two of actual value and things worth keeping.

It's become time to do that with my life. I've found all sorts of stuff sitting around, taking up space and much of it isn't of value or no longer represents who I am. I've found that its time to throw out a lot of the old and replace it with new. I've realized I've become pretty stale spiritually. I've been thinking many of the same thoughts, saying many of the same things and praying many of the same prayers for much too long. What I've ended up with isn't what I want to have any more.

The past few weeks I've gone through and thrown out a lot, I've sold a ton of books, I've thrown out illustrations and I've quit reading. I've decided to go back to a much more simple, direct approach and quit settling for what I have or once had. Most of it is meaningless to you but important to me. It's time to hold on to my past--the parts I need and that add value and its time to start reinventing myself, refreshing, transforming and becoming new. It should be that way all the time. it shouldn't just happen during spring cleaning and when you're frustrated because you have to move so much other stuff to get to the stuff you want. But that's not a bad time to start.