The Mindful Chore Week
If there was ever a more boring topic than a week of mindful cleaning, I’d love to hear it. This week’s task was all about being mindful whilst you do your routine chores, so I was to be more aware when I was washing dishes, hoovering up 50 tonnes of dog hair a day, and wiping the worktops when James leaves sauce and doesn’t bother to wipe it himself. Wow, can’t wait for this week!
In all honesty, this one really made me think about doing chores and I actually realised something. My first reaction was to groan because chores=dull, but I realised that’s not actually how I truly feel. It was a knee-jerk response because chores are automatically regarded as dull. But whilst I’m now at an age where I’m sure I should still be out partying every weekend, it dawned on me that I actually enjoy cleaning my house. Let that sink in!
This week when I was mindfully cleaning, I couldn’t help but notice how good I felt when it was done. I immensely enjoy having a nice, clean space, and I understand that cleaning is a means to an end. When I’m not elsewhere of a weekend (which admittedly is very rare at the minute and not often enough), I love to get up on a Saturday and absolutely blitz my house. The feeling it gives me when it’s done is up there with life’s greatest simple pleasures. Mindful expert or desperately sad? Who knows? Not me that’s for sure!
The task said that I was supposed to really pay attention to the way I conduct my chores and consider other ways to carry them out. But really, what other ways are there to hoover a floor or wipe a surface? It’s kind of a straightforward process and I quite like my routine and realised that I don’t actually want to change it because it works.
So this week’s takeaway was the realisation that I groaned when I opened the challenge card thinking how boring it was going to be, and soon realised that I already conduct chores in quite a mindful way. I also realised just how boring it is that I’m writing a blog post about cleaning and how happy it makes me, at the ripe old age of 29. I think I’m definitely far too old before my time, anybody would think I actually don’t have a life!
See you next week!
Reflect and Introspect 