Taking Time for You

For the last couple weeks, I have walked through my kitchen, cooked and cleaned in my kitchen and only gotten stuck a few times to the floor.  Yes, my floor has been gross and dirty.  I wouldn’t notice it every time I walked on it, just certain times when I would step in something sticky.  I would think to myself I really need to clean my floor, but I don’t have time right now.  I’ll do it later or I’ll clean it tomorrow.  I just knew how dirty it was and was sure it was going to take forever to get it clean.  Now this has been going on for weeks and finally I decided enough is enough, I am cleaning this floor today.

So, I got my water and vinegar mixture ready to clean my floors and I got on my hands and knees.  As I started scrubbing in the far corner it wasn’t too bad, then I got to the areas that have the most traffic like underneath the kitchen chairs and table.  Wow, it was bad.  I had to wash my rag out every two boards.  Each new spot I cleaned made this idea I was having in my mind become clearer and clearer until I realized that Heavenly Father wanted me to learn something from what some would call a mundane task around the home.  As this thought was coming to my mind I become really excited about cleaning my floor and getting it as clean as possible as quickly as I could.

The idea was this, that we are like a floor.  We start out clean and over time we make mistakes, we have challenges, emotions get trapped down inside of us and all of this “personal baggage” piles on.  Our floors get dirty, a spill is made here and there and sometimes you are in the middle of something else and you forget it happened, so you don’t clean it up.  Many times in our own lives things happen that we don’t fully process.  I think when my Dad died I didn’t fully process what was happening to me emotionally or what I was burying down inside of me.  Now a few years later I can look back and see the different areas of my life that were what you could call “sticky” or showing signs that I needed to pay attention and clean some stuff out of me.

When I finally finished cleaning the floor I kept thinking about how much easier that would have been if I would have taken care of the spills when they happened or even did a regular weekly maintenance of wiping my kitchen floor down.  Then the epiphany came.  What if we did that for ourselves?  What if we took better care of ourselves emotionally when things happened?   I began to think of ways that I could maintain a healthier emotional state by getting out the stuck emotions if I had the right tools and by paying attention to my personal warning signs that I needed to work on me.

I know sometimes the thought of working on ourselves and changing can be overwhelming and also a bit scary.  I know before I use to think what if I do this and it doesn’t work.  What if I don’t have enough time to spend to really fix the problem.  Don’t let little fears get in the way of working on cleaning up you.  I have been trying to clean me up just like I did my floor for a long time.  Sometimes I’m not as diligent about it, then I have a power purge day where I have to take a couple hours to clean my floor or some intense couple days trying to figure out why I stopped making the progress I want to.  These are hard and what would be way more effective would be if the cleaning up and clearing out was done day by day and not every couple months.  

I think Heavenly Father is amazing and that it’s awesome that He will teach us simple lessons while we are doing tasks that we routinely do, just like He taught me while I was cleaning my kitchen floor and it was very simple.  He showed me very clearly the importance of taking time daily to pay attention to the simple things happening in my life and how are they affecting me.  If I’m feeling agitated then work on it.  Journal about it and figure it out.  If I’m feeling stuck then write a letter to God and let Him speak back to me.  If I feel sad I try to figure out the source by praying and writing out what’s going on.  As I do this my emotional state is healthier and happier.  I’m not full of the gunk because I’ve been working on clearing it out, cleaning it up, and trying to understand better what I’m going through.  Keeping ourselves “clean” takes a consistent effort and when we do it we are happy and so are the people around us because they don’t get stuck in our personal gunk or the spot on the floor!