3P Random Reflections Blog

I always had a messy bedroom growing up. I don't know why.

Whenever my room was tidy, it appeared to be nicer to look at and was possibly easier to navigate, but that didn't seem to be a good enough incentive to consistently keep it that way.

Whenever my room wasn't tidy, I would often get yelled at to clean it up, and my clothes sometimes required the extra step of a toss in the dryer or a pass of an iron before I put them on, but that didn't seem to be a bad enough detractor to consistently stop it from being that way.

At the same time, I had some awareness of the world's expectations. I would know enough to tidy up my room if friends or relatives were coming over, and I would feel a sense of embarrassment if caught unexpectedly with a very messy room. But even that potential for shame wasn't enough of a detractor to keep my room tidy all the time. It just wasn't on my mind.

Oddly enough, I have always loved creating ways of organizing things in tidy, compartmental ways... I love the creativity and aesthetics of it. I just never tended to consistently use whatever brilliant and beautiful tidying systems I came up with. I'm still that way now. Isn't that hilarious?!

I don't know why it was all this way. It was just my experience, and at some significant level, it was and is all a complex and fascinating mystery. What makes one person regularly think and do any version of tidiness? What makes another person regularly NOT think and do it? We can come up with all sorts of reasons, but even the need for reasons is just another way of attempting to tidy up the inevitable messiness of the incomprehensible mystery of life.

A few years ago I realized something profound about life and my sense of self that I had never experienced before.

For a while, I lost all the labels that defined my world, including whether something was tidy or not and all that that would mean. No tidy. No not tidy. Just environments, people, experiences, and life in all its incredibly magnificent forms... pure awe and beauty and wonder. A true feeling of love without condition.

Sometime after that drop-of-labels experience, I had relatives coming over to visit, and I found myself tidying up.

What I noticed was that I wasn't stressfully and begrudgingly tidying up because of societal expectations or potential shame if I didn't. I was sort of just tidying with joy. I felt an underlying sense of reverence for all of life, including a deep reverence for my guests and a desire to honour their presence... and then... tidying just happened.

Nowadays I still carry plenty of labels around and view my world through the lens of those many tidying-type labels that bring about expectations and shame, but I'm much less enamoured by them. I frequently come to some awareness of their tricky illusory form... how they take something mysterious and wondrous and incomprehensible and unconditional... all the incredibly beautiful messiness... and reduce it to something very small and limited and constrained.

And so now, it's more that sometimes I tidy and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I enjoy it and sometimes I don't. And I truly don't know why either experience happens when it does. But it's all OK, and it's an incredibly beautiful, awe-inspiring mystery, isn't it?

With Love and Laughter,
Jonelle

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