Chop wood, carry water

"Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water."

- old Zen proverb

"You know you're in trouble when you see one of those 'house of squalor' stories on the 6 o'clock news, and it doesn't look as bad as your place."

- some guy on a web conference somewhere

I hate chores worse than about anything. I use big industrial-grade mops, brooms and such because when I do get around to cleaning, it's always a huge chore. I broke a mop handle in two the other day trying to get some kind of crud off the kitchen floor back where the doorway leads to the enclosed back porch.

I've had philosophical discussions both with myself and with others about hiring a housekeeper. And a lawn person. And someone to clean out the minivan, get the oil changed, etc. But good lord, who could I ask to undertake such a task?

Those of you on the Well will probably have already heard this story: a few years ago I bought one of those 'take control of your clutter' books. I lost the damn thing that same day and didn't find it until two years later. It was under an unopened Homeland Security size package of Double-Cloud Soft Unscented Charmin.

(I call it the 'Homeland Security' size because it's got 48 rolls, or 24 rolls of 2-ply, or 18 rolls of 2-ply with a tiny roller core or whatever. Anyway, it's a huge wad of TP. If the worst happens, I figure I'll get by without the duct tape, but I sure as hell don't want to run out of toilet paper.)

Well, anyway, getting back to the story, the book was under the Charmin and the Charmin was under some laundry, as I recall. But I finally read it, and made up my mind I was going to declutter my life.

I threw away and gave away tons of stuff. Old suits and sport coats. Sweaters that didn't fit when I bought them, and fit even worse as I gained weight. Old hard drives and shorted out USB cables. I usually fill about a fourth of city trash can every week. For twenty-something weeks in a row, I filled two of them full.

And I am still awash in crap.

And it's not just clutter. Some of it is plain old dirt.

Men, I think, are more prone to this than women. Lint and dust on the toilet between the seat and the tank mean nothing to us. It's just lint and dust, after all, and it's not like any part of our body comes in contact with it. And it's hard to get out of there. So why bother? It's not like it's hurting anything.

And men who are prone to depression are worse than those who aren't. You really don't want to get back there behind the toilet seat if you feel life is a pointless exercise in any event.

Buddhists talk about having an 'empty mind.' I tend to think of this as like having an empty room. If you walk into an empty room, yeah, it seems bare. But it also seems spacious and calm. It's ready to be filled with furniture and mementos and whatever – until it gets too full and if you can afford to, you empty it out and start over. So we do the same thing with our minds (again, just my interpretation/visualization), emptying out prejudices, assumptions, worries, old grievances, bad habits and so on until we have an empty room in which to work.

After I got into the 'empty mind' concept, I realized that the 'empty room' concept has some literal validity, too. A clean, simple, minimalist environment can encourage calm and serenity. Maybe eventually I will have one.

But at the moment, I am still awash in crap.