Day Twenty Four: Cleanliness

CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.

It is generally accepted that it is better to be clean than unclean, but why? Instinctually we feel that uncleanliness is gross, it is a social taboo. The reason why this social taboo is engrained in us is likely because uncleanliness can lead to sickness, which may in turn lead to death. Thus, there may be some genetic basis for a behavior of cleanness.

My problems with cleanliness are not related to the body or my clothes, but to my habitation. While I enjoy wearing fresh clothes and showering to avoid perpetuating a nice armoa of body odor, I loathe to clean up my house. The reason is that it feels like a menial task, one that I get nothing from, one that should be pushed aside to tackle issues of greater importance. So, it seems like this is a perfect task to engage in daily self-discipline practice. I must force myself to clean each day so that my habitation remains clean at all time, and reap the benefits of self-discipline exercise.

The first thing I should do, so that I can perpetuate this cleaning task, is to ensure that I have proper cleaning equiptment, that I am able to dust, that I am able to vacuum, that I can do everything that I should. While for whatever reason I dislike this sort of intitial investment, they are necessary items that I can use where-ever I live.

After I have the supplies, I simply need to set aside time each day, as I have for German lessons and writing this blog, that I will clean in. The hardest part of any new routine is making it a habit, not allowing for it to be an option in your mind, but a strict requirement without which the day is incomplete. The difficulty comes from tiredness, when you are ready to sleep, when the day wants so badly to end, but you have not yet finished your chores. This is when self-discipline becomes the hardest to practice, but is most important. When one makes a promise to oneself, it should never be broken. With repetition, you will realize that once you commit to a task, it is as good as done already.

But I digress...what is important here is cleanliness and developing habits that encourage a clean house. One habit I am going to try to enforce is to never do something in the spirit of laziness that I now will make the room even temporarily less clean. For example, dirty clothes often accumulate on the floor of my bathroom, eventually making the room a minefield of dirty gym clothes. From now on, I will always put things in their proper place, even when I am tired.

While I do not like the act of cleaning, I do enjoy a clean room. I feel less stress, more in charge of the situation, even though technically it would seem as if a dirty room is as functional as a clean one. Soon I will consistently know the feeling of a clean room, the reward for the menial chores of manual labor.