Sometimes you have to start with the easiest & most obvious. It's that whole "taste of success" thing. As a stay-at-home-mom, obviously I'd clean something everyday. Ought to.
Yet sometimes I don't. Things like laundry seem almost Sisyphean. With the kids always curious about everything, especially the things out of sight/out of reach, it's often easier to pile things up in my room to put up later. I don't even want to think about the accumulation of dust on my furniture and the "whatever" on my floors. (To be honest, we're cat-people, but I'd almost get a dog just to eliminate frequent floor chores since that involves mostly the kids dropping food.) I kind of sound like a slob, don't I?
I'm not. I am a reformed "pig-pen" kind of kid. My mom still tells tales of finding dirty clothes under my bed and dirty dishes, too, when I was in elementary school. I remember having a dresser drawer just full of junk & rocks I'd find while I was walking. My desk at school was so full of jumbled papers, I'd lose my pencils & couldn't get my books to stay in. It was bad. But sometime around turning into a teenager, I saw the error of my ways. I could not find the stuff I wanted & needed. So I got neater. Everything had a place; but it was OK to make a put-away-later-pile. I just had to put things away before the pile fell over. People began to compliment me on my organizational skills. I got better in college with meeting the challenges of living in small, shared spaces. And packing everything I own into one car. (I'm good. I have the family packing gene.)
As a mom, I'm excellent, since our house is small. I often joke that I know where all the bodies are buried. But it's true, I know where just about everything is (except my keys & my glasses, but that's another story.) I might even be addicted to plastic storage containers. Yet....
Things get away from me. I have high-needs kids, that can interrupt and interfere with my efforts. I've been depressed, so I've been unmotivated. It's a vicious cycle. All the clutter & piles contribute to my depressed feelings; my depressed feelings leave me too lethargic to deal with the clutter & piles.
Which is why I topped the list with the most obvious "Clean Something." Most days it's the mundane thing like tackling the the laundry. Sometimes it is the Herculean thing like cleaning & reorganizing my son's room. Every now & then it is the odd-ball thing like cleaning off all the mildew spots that have grown on the back door from being cooked in high Southern humidity since the trees behind our house were plowed.
Just do something. Fight the static inertia. A body in motion will stay in motion until it is acted upon by an outside force. I do not want to let depression have that sort of force on me again.
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