Life is messy…

I used to think that I just wanted to graduate high school because then I would finally get to be around people who have it all together.

When I was in college and that turned out to be anything but true, I couldn’t wait to graduate and get out into the real world working for real companies that had everything tied up.

Turns out, they don’t exist. This was utterly shocking to me.

How was it that I possibly lived my entire childhood thinking that there was an end to the messiness and the glory of being an adult is that you get to have it all figured out?

Adults do such a good job at faking it. So much so, sometimes, that I think they forget they don’t have it all figured out after all. Thus ensues your standard midlife crisis.

Finding Your Incidental Epiphany Zone

I’ve spent the better part of the last three years or so trying to figure out how to live the perfect, wrapped up life where everything runs smoothly and goes exactly the way I planned.

You can imagine how that turned out. Or maybe you can’t because you’re on the same quest.

I do a lot of soul-searching and thinking. I prefer to work in silence so I can listen to my own thoughts. Some people think I think too much. They might be right. But I’ve decided that if I’m ruminating about these deep questions of life, other people are probably grappling with the same stuff. So I figured I would shed some light about my very “un”scientific, yet arguably more important, experiential findings.

My findings sometimes unfold through the course of events. Bonus points if they’re hilariously inconvenient or maddeningly unfair because they make great fodder for blog posts.

More often they come to me as headlines (see, I am using my journalism degree…) in an instantaneous moment of clarity. Normally I’m washing the dishes or cleaning the kitchen. Sometimes I’m writing. In fact, I just realized that I should probably spend more time in the kitchen as that seems to be an epiphany zone for me.

It was just a few days ago that I was in the kitchen swinging around a towel (I’ll tell you later why this is such a significant trigger activity from my childhood), when I suddenly understood I was making a major mindset mistake that would doom me for the rest of my life if I didn’t address it immediately.

Worrying About Messes = Energy Deficiency

I’d been grappling with the fact that my house is always a mess and my friends’ and parents’ homes are always immaculate. Thing is, I hate cleaning. So I was trying to come to terms with the fact that my house is just going to be one of those messy homes, when it hit me! I’m spending way too much time and energy worrying about messes.

There will always be messes. It’s not worth worrying about solutions for cleaning up the mess more efficiently, more quickly or more anythingly. It’s learning how to live with the mess that will really get me somewhere.

My business, for example, will always be a mess. I can try and worry about how to solve the messiness of my business (not feeling like I have any clear point B, keeping a haphazard pile of receipts, etc.), or I can accept that it will be messy and just move on. The important things still get done. In fact, I get to spend more time with the important things when the less important but more annoying little things like worrying about how to solve the mess, aren’t bothering me anymore.

My closet will always be a mess. I can worry about how to organize it and keep it clean, or I can just accept that it’s going to be messy and it still works just fine.

The mental energy we spend on trying to solve problems that aren’t problems are the real mess. The problems in our lives that we make problems just by worrying about them and labeling them as messes wouldn’t exist if we knew how to accept, live with and move through the mess.

Relationships are a mess. You don’t solve relationships. You live them. You evolve with them. You change.

How Messes Really Go Away (Hint: They Don’t)

The thing about messes is that they exist with a pre-installed caveat – this must be cleaned. And so we naturally think we must clean up our lives. In some instances, (think hot mess), cleaning is a sufficient first step; however, despite the fact that it will feel good to check your “clean up my life” to-do off the list, it will always come back.

Messes don’t go away until we mentally clean them out of our neural pathways. Even then, they remain as spiderwebs and ghosts.

The rabbit hole of the mess works a little something like this:

  • Mess appears.
  • We feel embarrassed and ashamed about having the mess in the first place.
  • We feel like we need to clean the mess, but we have no motivation to clean.
  • We procrastinate and the mess increases.
  • We complain that life isn’t fair and whine to our loved ones.
  • The mess still doesn’t go away.
  • We hit a breaking point of emotion and angrily clean up the mess with vigor and intensity. Maybe that will make the mess go away forever.
  • We feel good that the mess is gone and that we’re just like all our clean friends.
  • We learn that our clean friends aren’t so clean after all and feel hurt that they didn’t tell us they were just as unclean as we are.
  • The mess returns.
  • The cycle starts over.

Notice how I have yet to specifically define the type of mess I’m talking about here. It doesn’t need to be defined. It works for the pile of dirty dishes mounting in the sink to the bad habits we’ve entrenched in our systems to the ugly relationships we keep returning to over and over again to the nasty self-criticism that constantly tells us we’re not good enough and certainly not deserving of anything we’d ever truly want in life.

The Messy Metaphor

The mess is a metaphor. It shows up in front of our face in the form of dirty clothes piles to remind us that there’s something deeper going on here. It serves as a reminder to examine how we choose to live the moments of our lives. If you haven’t chosen intentionally, your first step is to make a choice – Worry about cleaning everything because it really is that important to you, or learn how to deal with the mess and move on. From there, you must learn to observe non-reactively. Only then will the mess start to reveal it’s true wisdom.

So don’t be fooled by your perfect, clean-ly friends. Without a mess, they’re missing out on a lot of wisdom. They’re spending time and energy cleaning up the mess without inquiring as to why they’re doing so in the first place. Without knowing what they truly want to do with their lives – because let me telling you, cleaning up other people’s messes is draining, unfulfilling work.

Just recognize the mess and your urge to clean and make an intentional choice.

It’s the little things in life that lead us to the biggest breakthroughs. So clean because you’re looking for your soul, not because someone once told you your house had to be clean at all times otherwise you’re a bad wife and mother.

So tell me in the comments below: how are you going to spend your energy when it comes to messes? 

Image Credit: Moyan_Brenn