On Cleanliness
Cleanliness or the lack thereof has played a significant role in my life over the years. I remember being admonished many a time by my aunt, as a teenager, to clean up after myself. Essentially she asked me to put things back in place once I am finished. A simple task that I found hard to comply with. I used to wonder what’s the big deal. So what if the newspaper was on the couch? She liked things in order and the house clean, but to me it didn’t matter. So clearly we were operating at different wavelengths leading to conflicts.
Then there was the time when my roommate complained that there was toothpaste in the sink after I brushed my teeth. Big deal, right ! Being the dreamer that I was, I paid little attention to the sink when I was brushing and afterwards. Turns out I hardly noticed the state of the sink when I finished brushing. For I had more important things to do. Leaving that sink spick and span was the last thing on my mind. But to my roommate that was too important to ignore, as looking at the dirty sink (Eeyu !!!) I left behind perhaps ruined his day.
Why do we all have different views on cleanliness? Is it because some of us are born to be clean while others amongst us could care less? If provided the choice of being clean or unclean, would a majority of us chose the former or the latter? Have you asked yourself why you choose one over the other? Is it a conditioned response a Pavlovian reflex or an inborn impulse that you can’t explain? Are we clean in all circumstances, i.e, do you have a clean desk but a messed up drawer where you can’t find anything?
Having grown up in India I was exposed to a lot of both. I witnessed even the poorest of the poor cleaning their tenements every day but then dumping their trash right outside their homes. Let’s ignore that the trash collection system was deficient for the moment. Is this behavior akin to cleaning the desk and messing up the draw? Has cleanliness got to do something with how our brains are wired? Are the left-brained logical folks more likely to be clean than the right-brained creative types? What if you are a hybrid like me a logical thinker with inspired bursts of creativity?
Does being clean require extra amounts of energy? Does it draw us away from doing other things that interests us? Let’s ignore the professional cleaners who do it for a living. For everyone else cleaning is a chore that is unpleasant and not pleasure giving. For a pleasure seeking human the act of cleaning is avoidable as it probably does not lead to the production of serotonin a harbinger of happiness.
Our attitude towards cleanliness controls our life. At different stages in our life we tend to get more or less clean. Some of us change; for not doing so could make our lives difficult with our significant others. Maybe when we are young, and free spirits we tend to be disorderly. For order does not matter when we are exploring the possibilities that life puts in front of us. Our parents and our families gave us the structure, so we cared less about things around us when we were young. It’s like in Frost’s “Miles to go before we sleep”, we felt as if we have not enough time to do the things we want while we are growing up, so why worry about being clean.
As we get older our lives tend to get more chaotic as we realize that we no longer have much control of what happens next. We try to bring order within the four walls of our home to battle the chaotic environment outside. Being clean and orderly gives us the satisfaction of having some structure in our life.
Perhaps that’s why our perspective changes at different stages in our life !
