We all love a clean home.
It smells clean, it looks clean. You don’t need to worry about walking in and seeing clothes all over the place. You don’t have to worry about dirty dishes in the sink.
Just by being clean, you also cut down on the dust, mold and other potential allergens in the house.
While this is all good stuff, there is another benefit to having a clean house and it’s not what you might think.
Have you ever thought how amazing the process of cleaning is for you?
It’s great to move garbage from your house to the trash.
It’s a great feeling to move around in a space that is uncluttered, especially when your home might be full of things that aren’t exactly things you’d like to have in your space.
This is the hidden benefit of cleaning and of a clean house.
The cathartic benefit of cleaning is one of the best forms of stress relief out there.
Maybe it’s just the tossing process, maybe it’s the trip down memory lane or maybe it’s something else entirely.
We spend our lives running around, working, playing, collecting stuff.
The stuff we collect is not just physical stuff though.
We collect memories. We collect challenges. We collect failures and successes. We collect old relationships and problems with our boss.
Our homes are collection bins for our lives.
It holds all the good, all the bad, all the things we never want to forget and all the things that we want to keep from anyone else’s eyes.
Some of it takes a physical form- papers, awards, letters, photographs, dried flowers, trophies.
Some of it takes a less visible form, naked to the human eye- emotional scars, fears, neuroses, tears, anger.
All of these things build up inside of us as well as build up in our homes.
While the invisible things don’t take up space in our homes, they do take up space in our hearts and inside our heads.
This is why we need to do some cleaning.
We need to clean both of our houses.
We need to clean the physical crap out of our homes and we also need to clean the mental and emotional junk out of our bodies.
Task #1 is significantly easier than task #2.
This is exactly the reason why we need to clean our homes.
This is the exact reason why cleaning our homes is good for our health.
We need to clean out the junk in our homes because the junk that’s in our bodies isn’t so easy to get rid of.
Think no-cost stress relief. Think easy way to get a cleaner house with hidden side effects.
When we are able to let go of things- even old clothes- we open up a window of possibility even if that window is open for just some new clothes
More importantly, we are opening up a window into a second chance- one where we might be able to let go of some of the junk that we’re holding onto that no longer serves us.
This is why I clean.
This is why I continue to clean.
I may get a clean house, but I know that it’s really doing something else, something more important.
Cleaning my house keeps me healthy, both inside and out.
