The power of a cupboard

Sometimes it’s best to just stuff your sin away in a cupboard and get on with your life.

My home, as I may have mentioned, has been something of a visual cacophony these past few months, and I couldn’t seem to get on top of it, or even really make any headway with it. Week after week my routine chores would fail to scratch the surface of the clutter that had become endemic to my abode, my thankless toiling at the kitchen sink or laundry basket fundamentally incapable of making anything look any cleaner or suitably arrayed. My vacuum cleaner broke in protest at having to skirt awkwardly around lumps of various classification. I was despondent, defeated, and prevented from practicing yoga by just a bit too much stuff on the floor.

Here’s the thing. I have a large, large cupboard. When I put things in the cupboard, they cease to exist. So I had pulled things out of the cupboard, to force myself to deal with them. And then I did not deal with them. In half a year, I probably dealt with three of them. Okay, maybe I’m not being fair to myself, maybe it was five. But there were more than five things that I had pulled out of the cupboard. Yet I could not put them back in the cupboard, because then I would not deal with them.

You see my predicament. The solution to my problems was the very thing I had told myself prevented me from solving my problems. And so I resisted my salvation for far too long.

…I finally put them back in the cupboard.

Now all is well. Life is a breeze. My Roomba is free to roam. I’m going to do some yoga tonight. I might even go for a run first, not because it’s related, just because I fucking well can. Sure, there will be a time when there is something I need, and it will take three hours of concerted effort to extract it from the cupboard, but that time is not now. What I needed in this moment was floor space.

Ctrl, Alt…

I’ve always quite liked the idea of being in prison.

I’ve never particularly been a fan of the things I’d have to do to end up in prison. And, I’ll be honest, committing the crimes is probably less offputting to me than being judged to have committed crimes. But the simple, structured, externally-imposed aceticism of prison is a soothing concept. If I imagine existing in a world of white breeze block walls, smooth hard surfaces, rigid routines and basic expectations, ah, that feels nice. I know rationally that the experience of prison cannot be described that way, but still, nice.

It’s probably because my inner world is impossibly convoluted, and navigating its labyrinth can be so exhausting that I often don’t care for the mundane complexities of everyday modern life. That’s probably why. I’d also find it quite helpful to have someone tell me when to eat. And what. And where.

Sometimes I wish I could simply delete all the clutter from my life. Make everything but the bare necessities vanish. Take away the luxuries. Take away the choices. Take it all away.

Occasionally I do delete the clutter – carpet bomb any and all offending areas of my life and start over. The problem with that is, while it gets rid of one kind of mess, it tends to leave another. Because in real life, everything is connected to everything else. There are never the clean edges between deleted and non-deleted that I hope to find. In real life, the best you can hope for is partial deletion. Which is dissatisfying.

But it’s often a blessing.