Whenever I stay with my best friend and her husband, I am not there more than two days before she says to me, with her usual acerbic delivery, “Oh that’s right. I forgot. You grew up with servants.”
“Not servants,” I snipe back. Every single time. “I didn’t grow up in Downton Abbey.”
What she means is that I have not washed something up immediately, or that I have left something lying around that shouldn’t be there. She keeps a clean house and runs a tight ship. And I am, well, more laissez faire about my living arrangements. Furthermore, since I live on the road, when I do land someplace, it feels like Christmas just to be able to spread out a bit.
She’s not the only person to comment on this. Another friend with whom I stay from time to time refers to my arrival as a tornado, I think she said. Perhaps it was a hurricane. Or a maelstrom.
She does not mean I am dirty. In fact, I am more likely to do the dishes than she is. What she means is that I arrive and suddenly her entire house is scattered with my stuff.
The funny thing is that this iteration is a vast upgrade over previous operating systems . As a kid, I never received my allowance because my room NEVER met my mother’s standards of tidiness When I was in college, my room was such a mess that you couldn’t see the floor. Various partners with whom I lived almost tore their hair out in frustration about my messiness.
I did my best. I always kept a clean house. Which is to say I paid for it to be cleaned top to bottom once a week. I tried organizing things in a variety of ways. But my overall proclivity toward clutter and laziness about cleaning up after myself remained.
Then slowly but surely I realized that all the clutter hurt my head. That I couldn’t think — let alone work productively — if I was surrounded by clutter. And slowly but surely, I began getting better and better at sorting. But since I am always doing too many things at once, I have to make clutter clearing a practice or it just happens. Even this computer browser has too many tabs open because I am working on too many online projects for clients.
That said, I have grown less and less tolerant of my own ways of living. Less and less fond of stuff. And dirtiness has never been acceptable.
That’s why living on the road has always been so great. I have to have less stuff. I stay in AirBNBs or with friends where my cleanliness matters. And yet, truth be told, if I can afford to pay someone to clean up after me, I will do it. Because although they were not “servants”, that is how I grew up. And it has engendered a lifelong sense of privileged laziness that I’ve never been able to release.
Until now.
I’ve been in my little 100-year-old cottage for almost three months. I LOVE IT! But It is old and drafty. The basement floods every time it rains — as it did torrentially for two hours yesterday. Mice seem to come in and take up residence whenever it suits them. And the spiders LOVE it here!
I walk every day. I now have a vegetable garden, so I go in and out a lot. And of course I have a dog, who seems to bring in flora on her feet and coat every time she goes out.
And so I have to clean. I have to clean because I like a clean house. And because I spend about 21 - 22 hours a day on average in this house — except for walking and gardening — and clutter and dirt would eventually drive me to distraction.
But there is no cleaning crew to come in. It’s just me.
And so. .. drumroll please. . .I not only have become my own cleaning crew. . .I LOVE IT!
I rarely take time off. Which is to say I work seven days a week. But I have to take a break from staring at computer screens, and when I do, what I choose to do — WHAT I CHOOSE TO DO — is clean. Yesterday I spent five hours cleaning this house from top to bottom. By the end, it sparkled. This is the fourth or fifth time now I’ve cleaned this way. And I always look forward to it being done and having a spanking clean house.
That was enough, at first. The promise of cleanliness.
But the last two times I’ve cleaned, I realized something stunning. I actually LIKE to clean. I enjoyed myself both times. I have a hard time sitting still anyway. If I’m talking to someone on the phone, I’m usually walking outside or pacing inside. So cleaning is ideal. It is constant movement.
But it’s more than that. I have always liked to be in a clean space. I just never thought I would like to create that clean space for myself. And so even when money was too tight to do anything, I always hired someone to clean. But now I look forward to cleaning myself. WOW!
Why am I sharing all this in a week that has been focused on we and white privilege and having hard conversations about race and class and poverty and privilege?
It’s that last word: Privilege.
I grew up in a 9.000 square foot house as the child of famous people. And even though my parents did everything they could not to raise a “Beverly Hills brat” — as my mother called it — a sense of privilege and entitlement comes with growing up rich.
To my credit, I have not chose that lifestyle. I have lived without running water and heat. I have rarely used the privilege to ask for help — in fact, often the opposite. I haven’t used the connections I have when I should have. I have constantly tried to shed those skins of privilege and elitism into which I was born. But the fact is, they’re there. And they color all my choices. Just as my white privilege does — and is inherent to any white person who grew up in the United States or the Western World.
That’s why yesterday I felt filled with joy when I realized that I actually LOVE to clean.
Now my head won’t tell you that. My head will tell you that I’d always rather have a cleaning crew. Because my head is still steeped in a lifelong pattern of thinking.
But cleaning this cottage has taught me otherwise. I love this cottage. I love my landlord. I love that I have such a wonderful place to be. And so I want to keep it clean for all of those reasons. And so cleaning has become a heart-centered practice. And that’s why I love it. I love it because cleaning connects me to Love.
Perhaps my head will always try to tell me that I “deserve” the privilege of having my house cleaned by someone else. But now that my heart is finding joy in cleaning, I won’t listen to my head as automatically.
Yesterday, as I was mopping the kitchen, that’s what came through to me: “If this can be healed in me, anything can heal in anyone.”
Yes, every white person in the world has to keep looking at our histories and our habits and our assumptions and our privilege.
Yes, we have to keep having the hard conversations and building new coalitions and connections.
But we also have to invite Love to the table to transform all of our thoughts and words and actions into heart-centered practices.
In recent years, creating heart-centered practices has healed a lifelong habit of rude and chronic lateness. I was never ever on time — and it infuriated everyone who loved me or who worked with me. I have healed the looming presence of my mother in my life that I used to keep me in cripplingly virulent self-loathing. So I know this stuff works.
A privilege is a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group. When we grow up steeped in certain kinds of privileges, they can come to seem invisible. No matter how many times someone teased me or despaired of my messiness, I thought that I could fix it by throwing money at it. Even when I didn’t have the money to throw. That is privilege. Privilege is not about what you have. I often didn’t have the money to pay for cleaners, but I believed that I should, and so I did. Privilege is about what you believe you should have. And then acting from that belief.
Should, I often say, is spelled wrong. It’s a four-letter word in disguise. We spend so much time shoulding all over ourselves and one another and our planet, that we have left Love out of the equation.
White privilege is the millennia-old belief that white people should be superior to other races — and then acting out from that belief. The only way to fundamentally shift that is to invite Love in to show us how Love sees. Love sees as love. Love loves. And Love does not prioritize anyone as more lovable than anyone else. It is to make listening and leaning into Love a heart-centered practice — and then living Love every single day.
It is time for us all to clean house. And to find joy in it. It is time for us all to dig deep and unearth the unseen privileged assumptions that guide our words and actions. And — as this pandemic and this long-overdue flashpoint of standing up to endemic racism is showing us — this is a longterm commitment.
But we cannot do it alone. In fact, we can ONLY do it with Love, as Love, through Love, in Love. If we don’t make these conversations about white privilege and systemic racism, about class inequities and justifiable hate, about all the skewed ways our ideas of privilege have broken us and our world heart-centered, then nothing will change.
Living Love is NOT optional. It’s NOT.
And Living Love is the ultimate heart-centered practice of we. Because Love loves. Love only sees we. Only sees Oneness. And Love dissolves privilege through compassion and kindness and love.
So today let’s all invite Love into clean our houses and show us how to stop shoulding all over everything.
This is how we all #LoveViral.
