At many points in my life I have felt very antagonistic towards routines, especially imposed routines and ideas about the goodness of routines. I have created small routines for myself, but they have been short term and very personal. I have been curious where this antipathy, or even fear, comes from. I think there is some large element of needing to follow my own flow and inspiration in learning and creating, which are not things that can be scheduled. I have a strong inner aversion to being locked in and stuck. I felt this in childhood at the start of a school year, just knowing what my school hours would be was both exciting and frightening. One of the strongest times I felt the inner push-back against being constricted was when I was offered a fourth day of teaching in Rochester. This was something I hoped for and needed, and when it came to the point of fruition, I could barely scrape myself off the couch for a couple of days on account of dread. I also have felt heavily pinched when it was time to do our school-year scheduling as an independent business. I have enjoyed the actual tetris problem and the creation of the schedule. But seeing the next 10 months of my life on paper feels like an overwhelming burden.
Yet, much to my surprise, something seems to have shifted for me, or at least be shifting, in the last few years. My inner free spirit has been less disappointed in acknowledging that the modern world is forced to run on calendars and clocks and diaries... Prior to last summer, the needs of the moment were so unpredictable, huge, and at times unmanageable, for a decade, that the idea of routines and schedules felt particularly odious. Yet things in my outer world have shifted, and there has been calm from the knowing of the immediate future brought on by routines. Everyone in our house struggles with transitions, as many people do, and for many of us, advanced warning (not the famous "5 minutes 'til we stop" adage), seems to help keep us even. I mean the sort of advanced warning where everyone knows what us going to happen day after day. This has been something that has been very difficult for me to create or even accept until it started shifting inside me with with no outside admonishments.
This past Sunday, the first of our summer term, I was doing the weekly scheduling email to students and doing our traditional summer weekly whiteboard-ing of room assignments, and I had the sudden inspiration to add three daily items for the family with times attached. Two of the items were already going to be, but even my willingness to write them on the calander surprised me.
In response to this family scheduling, there has been some angsty pushback from the kid I predicted and difficulty with the selected numbers along with a certain comfort in knowing from the other kid predicted. And there has been some wailing from me about now that I created a schedule, why doesn't it just work. But I do think these are all just part of the birth pangs and life, really. Human bodies were created in an era without clocks beyond the sun, without calendars beyond the moon and stars, and without train schedules and time zones, with merely the relatively manageable tasks of finding the next meal in a forgiving climate... And death was inevitable sooner or later, as it still is.
...Last November before I got on the audition train, I was looking around our house and seeing with the eyes of an outsider that our serious physical chaos was an indicator of too much stuff jammed into our small physical space. Certain ways of being which work for many people have repeatedly proved themselves not to work in our house, and therefore solutions require material shift, not just being more organized or diligent or having better routines. I had identified several pieces of furniture and their contents which needed to leave for greener pastures and give us back space.
I had meant to get back to this project after the audition train dropped me off, but I just couldn't get up the nerve. However, I work on inspiration and surprise deadlines very effectively, and was given the sudden gift of that. We are going to have company staying with us next week, so I was able to look at our space with that in mind. A few major points stood out to Jared and me, and one of those aligns well with the get-rid-of-extraneous-furniture project.
That would be the bathroom. Anyone unfortunate enough to have been in our bathroom in the last couple of years will know that in addition to the endemic wall plaster peeling and sloped-the-wrong-way drainage, there were other major problems of our own creation. These centered around the large, black industrial shelving which blocked the tub and sink, and collected junk, junk, junk, junk, and garbahge.... Imagining our guests needing to use the bathroom in the middle of the night lent clarity to the next steps. Since Friday I took down, cleaned out, scrubbed, reinstalled and organized our beautiful, homemade glass-front medicine cabinet. I cleaned our light fixtures and Jares and I replaced the faulty bulbs. I installed two hanging racks with found items from our shed (which I think turned out quite charmingly) so the kids now have small, personal, designated places to keep their bathroom items in a way which can not physically collect the debris and slime that horizontal surfaces in our house seem to attract so strongly. I cleared off all three levels of the black shelves. This took an entire day, and the amount of nasty stuff left behind on the floor in its wake was... shocking. Jared, thank the good Lord, scrubbed the floor before I had a chance to get to it. I am so grateful, because I almost couldn't eat dinner or be up and about the cabin after picking through the garbage on the floor, as the lingering repulsion was so strong. Then yesterday, the eldest and I picked through the giant box which was for fabric scraps to be used in sewing and crafting projects. We saved a nice basket-full, found a lot of missing clothing items, filled a small trash bag with candy wrappers and a whole lot of other items too horrible to mention, and filled a giant trash bag with textile scraps which are slated for delivery to textile recycling tomorrow. I had to take a shower to wash off the filth of that box, and I also repaired the step stool my youngest still uses in the bathroom. The tub and shower and sink and toilet still need more scrubbing, and I need to replace our laundry basket with something more discrete and with a better form factor. I also need to finish making a towl rack out of salvaged lumber and railroad spikes I treated a few years ago and got side-tracked on. Those portions don't need to be completed before our guests arrive. Everyone is in shock at how large and relatively beautiful our bathroom is now, and Jared pointed out it should be easier to keep clean this way. The giant black industrial shelves left for a neighbor's garage last night and are no longer our problem.
...One of the items I added to the family schedule unexpectedly last Sunday is a daily family cleaning time. This is something I could only have dreamed of a couple of years ago. The last couple of days Jared has put this task force to great use, mobilizing to clean out huge piles of garbage from the living/kitchen/dining areas, vacuuming, scrubbing, and mopping.
Last night, one child was handed the drawer from under the stove in the back yard, and who turned on some rap music and attacked it with a scraper, cleaning solutions, and scrubbers, to good result after about a half hour. Said cleaner was so happy with the result they proclaimed no need for video and game time and their love of spending all day outside and their desire to have an intensive year-round family cleaning schedule. While I know that was a short-lived euphoria, it was a nice moment.
Another child was less able to contribute as they suddenly had great angst about a chest of drawers which had changed hands some years ago - a transaction which I don't remember at all and have no way to fix. Based on other experiences, this great sadness may last some weeks. I can only offer my own adult theory that this sadness is brought about by so much change which has brought some happiness to this small human, even positive change, in our physical space in the last few days.
A third child enjoyed mopping while pretending to be a potato.
...Also this week, in addition to teaching ad rescheduling what seemed like endless cancelations, I selected, assigned, and sent around music for the July 8 week in-house group workshop. The younger group will do some Suzuki repertoire from books 1 and 2, some Bartok duets, and a Fiddle tune. The older group will do a Bach Chorale and two movements of the Corelli Christmas Concerto.
I also made the finishing arrangements on a reading session tomorrow in which our new next-door cellist neighbor will be joining us and two others to play through the Schubert Cello Quintet for fun.
Today is the longest day of the year. We will do something to celebrate (the celebration is on the weekly schedule), but what, I don't know. Likely my wants-to-be-in-charge child will cook up an idea.
Anyway, if our guests of next week happen to he reading this, you will not think our house miraculously clean. It will merely be less awful than how it has been....
