Sweep out the Old, Sweep in the New

The day is dark and damp and I am home with nothing to do, which is to say, nothing that presses. How best to spend the time?

Earlier in the week there were errands and small chores. I caught myself rushing through them, as though there were not enough hours in the day for all that I had to do, which was false. So I forced myself to slow down and when I did I noticed the color of the sky and the architecture of the bare trees.

At home I did what I often do when I haven’t decided what to do next: I swept the kitchen floor. I love sweeping. When I brush the crumbs and dust and tracked-in dirt into the dustpan and tilt the pan into the trash can under the sink, I feel like I have done something that needed doing — that this fine layer of benign filth should not have been there and that I have therefore restored order.

I have held this view of sweeping ever since I saw an old woman sweeping the steps of her steep and narrow street in Lisbon years ago. It’s possible I romanticize this scene, but I felt like I was witnessing a rite rather than a chore.

Too often, the simplest tasks can seem like an enormous bother: rinsing a glass, folding a sweater, filing paperwork, hanging up a coat. We imagine we’ll have more time later, more energy, more patience.

One has only to live thus for a day or two before a general sense of disorder settles on the house. We can ignore it, we can question the relationship between order and beauty, or between chaos and shame, but at a certain point I know I will feel better when I have cleaned up the messes I have made and I will wonder why I allowed the messes to pile up in the first place when it would have been so much easier to put the clothes away when I took them off, or rinse the glass after draining the last drop.

A friend of mine, despite having all the important boxes checked off – loved ones, meaningful work that pays a meaningful wage, a comfy apartment — is forever asking me what it all means.

I laugh off the question because I grew up in a culture that taught me to buy time with a joke while thinking of something serious to say. The dodge usually works. The conversation wanders off, the question goes unanswered.

Except I keep thinking about it.

So here is what l’m thinking on this dark, damp early winter day. I start with the belief that our lives are precious and if precious, sacred. One ramification is that since there’s no reason to believe that our lives are more sacred than anyone else’s, we must treat everyone as if their lives are sacred as well. Another is that everything we come in contact with is sacred.

That awareness prompts us to slow down to take proper care of things, thus turning chores into rituals, to sweep, fold and file as if we were arranging flowers.

In another 10 days, when the hurly burly begins again on campus, I’ll probably revert to my usual slapdash way of doing things, but I’m hoping to at least remember this conversation I’m having with myself a few years from now when I walk out of the classroom and into retirement.

I have been preparing for retirement in two ways: by listing all the things I can do to occupy my time when my time is free — read, write, teach literacy, coach writers, construct crossword puzzles, play guitar, take walks, be a grandpa, gather with dear ones – and by grilling my retired friends about what they’re doing with all their newfound free time.

Today I see this is the wrong approach. I’m likely to do all the things on my list hurriedly, the way I was doing those errands and chores the other day, unless I can downshift from killing time to taking time.

And what matters is not what my retired friends are doing but how they’re doing it. Asked what he’d do if the world were ending tomorrow, Martin Luther supposedly said he’d plant apple trees. My version: I’d sweep the kitchen floor.

I’m hoping to get to the point where I am so keenly aware of how little time I have left that I savor everything – that I live as if I had all the time in the world.

In the meantime, work in progress that I am, instead of staying home with nothing to do this week, I’m off to savor the most exciting city in the world. See you in this space in the new year!