Refresh

This week's Journal 52 prompt was Refresh...you can read more about it HERE.  Basically, the prompts asked 'what do you do to refresh your mind/body/spirit'?

What do I do when I need a pick-me-up?  It depends on why I need one...  I want to say art...obviously.  But also, I am a cleaner.  When I get nervous or mad, I clean.  Everything else might be out of my control, but I can make the toilet SPARKLE.  I can organize the kitchen cabinets.  I can put things in their place.  

The good thing about it is that when I'm upset, my house ends up looking like actual human adult people live in it...as opposed to mentally deranged hoarders a la Mad Max...  The less than desirable part is that I rarely realize I'm upset until I find myself cleaning.  It's like Martha Stewart's done some kind of zombie spell on me, and suddenly I've got a can of Pledge and a microfiber cloth in my hand...against my will.  

The other bad part is that once I find myself obsessively cleaning and realize it's because I'm upset, I don't always know why it is that I'm upset.  But experience has taught me that if I do anything more than necessary cleaning (aka washing dishes because there are literally no other containers in your house for you to drink out of...) on any given day, there is DEFINITELY something wrong.  So then I'm charged with the task of figuring out why I'm cleaning/upset.  I sometimes wish I could just magically see the answer in the dish soap bubbles...although then I'd freak out, stop doing dishes altogether and have to run around drinking gallons of milk at a time, just so I don't need a glass...

So I kind of wanted to do a page about cleaning making me feel refreshed, but then I realized that it would make people assume my house is clean, when in reality, it looks like squatters have overtaken an abandoned hovel...and the rest of the people would probably get mad cause women's lib and act like I just told them to get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich...and while I do love sandwiches, I don't want to lose any friends over it...

So instead, I made this page:

"There is nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater, you realize that you've been missing the whole point of the ocean." - Dave Barry
"Refresh your viewpoint."

So, between you and me, this chunky mermaid (who is adorable, right???  ...if I was a mermaid, I would totally look like this one...my tail is so fancy!) stands for my quirk of cleaning when I'm upset...that quote goes along with it too...  On the surface, I'm just making my house be a step further away from being condemned by the city...but the whole point of that ocean (an ocean made of Windex and 409) is that I'm not a happy camper and I need to figure out why.  

And the thought that things are rarely only what they seem to be led me to this:

"The world is round and the place which may seem like the end, may only be the beginning."

Endings are scary...at least for me.  I don't know why.

When I was a younger, I loved change.  It was exciting!  As I've gotten older, I seem to have become a codger, yelling at kids to get off my lawn, and being scared of anything new or different.  This is so NOT me...not the way I want to be.

My Pinterest feed clearly has my best interests at heart, because it sent the above quote my way.  The end of something is the beginning of something else...the start of a new adventure...the conflict and drama where the book becomes a page turner.  The end is the beginning.  

That's much less scary than THE END.  The beginning is exciting and new and as-yet-untainted by anything.  The creepy, gross caterpillar ends and a less creepy, more beautiful butterfly emerges from the shell of it's former life.  Endings are not the end...they are only the start of something different.  

That's exactly what I needed to hear right now.