What do you do when the person you love doesn’t see the mess the way you do?
R often teases me about my need for order: the bed made in a certain way, the dishwasher loaded like a Tetris game, everything put away neatly at the end of the day so I wake to a clean home in the morning. The only things that escape my ‘rules and regulations’, as he calls them, are my books – I love to have the stacked EVERYWHERE even if I am only reading one or two at any given time. Why don’t they all go on the bookshelf where they belong? I don’t know. It feels cozier.
I have been trying to explain to him why this all matters so much to me, and I think it comes down to my value of simplicity. When my space is clean, my nervous system relaxes and I can think more clearly. Order is soothing to me (is it not soothing to everyone?!). I regularly clear out what I don’t use anymore, bringing unwanted but still usable goods to the charity shop or giving them away for free online. There is something in that process that reminds me to stop accumulating material things.
R is not messy, but he moves to a different rhythm than me. The result is that not everything is as I want it and I feel resentful about the extra work I have to do to restore order to my standards. I can’t force him to follow my rhythm and ensure everything is back where it belongs at the end of the day, so I have two options: relax my standards, or acknowledge that I am restoring order for me, not for us, and change my attitude.
I love this poem by Angela Narciso Torres for the mindset shift she encourages. What if every chore was an opportunity for prayer, or an act of kindness, generosity, or devotion? If you, like me, are someone who has a mildly obsessive-compulsive need for order in their lives and are resentful that others in your life don’t seem to feel it the same way, perhaps see if you can view those chores through a new lens: as an invitation to lovingly attend to what’s in our lives and purge what no longer serves us. Even the process of folding and putting away laundry can be a meditation if done with love.
Poem: Chore, by Angela Narcisco Torres
