It’s Time to Clean Up

“It’s time to clean up!”

I don’t know about you, but at certain points in my life I cringed at the sound of those words, especially when it meant I had to wash a mountain of dishes that I did not make! But no matter how much I despised cleaning up, living in a dirty house wasn’t an option for me or my family. So mop in hand and with our jams on in the background, we cleaned.

Now that I’m responsible for my own cleanup efforts, I find that it’s easier to tuck things away and hide from/ignore the messes in my space like my bathroom full of makeup and hair products, my closet full of clothes that I cannot bare to throw away (hoarding potential) or Pepper’s (My new puppy!) corner that’s in desperate need of a scrub down. That’s until someone in my family comes over, which they always do, and comments on it. I mean I asked you to come over and visit, not become Matlock Sherlock all in my space! Anyway, I cannot lie, it does open my eyes that amidst the long days and seemingly endless tasks that I have in my life, cleaning up should still be a top priority.

And then I began to think. How many of us are not only hiding away from the physical messes in our life, but the personal and mental messes too? Maybe you’re hanging on to that friend who you’ve known for a long time but always brings drama in your life or that bad habit that you told yourself you were going to stop a long time ago. Yes cleaning up your personal life may not be fun, but it’s absolutely necessary.

Imagine this. You just bought a brand new house. The walls are void of scratches and the floor is so clean you could eat off of it. Then life settles in. The laundry starts piling up and the dishes are being left in the sink, but you’re house looks great on the outside. The floors are never swept and the couches are soiled from the countless dinners that are eaten on them without being cleaned up afterwards, but your house looks great on the outside. And finally, there is so much stuff that you’ve acquired and haven’t organized that you can barely move from room to room….but your house looks good on the outside. Then you start to think, well as long as it looks good on the outside, it doesn’t matter what’s going on in the inside. Until the day your friend comes over all excited about seeing your new house, and you can barely get to the door because of all the mess that is in the way.

That’s how it can be in our lives sometimes. It easy to get caught up on how our life looks to other people, that we neglect the reality of our situation and how bad we really may feel. Don’t miss out on enjoying life because you’ve ignored certain problems when they were hills and now they’ve become mountains…like a mountain of dishes…which I have to go clean when I get back home. (Ugh!) 🙂

Christmas is just around the corner and before you know it it’ll be 2016. I know my family likes to make sure the house is super clean and that we throw away all our junk before our extended family comes into town, but I’m going to make an effort to take inventory of the personal junk that I need to get rid of in my life as well.

So when you go to that “friend” and let them know you guys cannot hang anymore and they ask why, just say, “I’m cleaning up.” When you start to eat better and your family pushes fried chicken in your face just push it back and say, “No, I’m cleaning up.” And last but not least, when you want to go out and be a social butterfly but you KNOW your house is a complete mess, just this once say, “I can’t this time. I have some cleaning up to do.” Best of wishes to you and your cleanup efforts! I know you can do it!

-Keturah Greene, Public Information Assistant for the Liberty County Chamber of Commerce

 

The Right Blend Blog is written by three different authors employed by the Liberty County Chamber/CVB. As we are able we rotate weeks and each write about our individual experiences, opinions and let our writing reflect our personalities and creativity. All content provided on The Right Blend blog is for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site.