Spring Cleaning

This is an excerpt from the weekly News-Loveletter. If you would like it sent to your inbox directly (with all the other juicy bits, including a mini joy practice), you can add yourself to my mailing list here.

The cobwebs have been collecting in every corner. I sit at my desk and stare absently at the ceiling as they wave their dusty hello. Frankly, it’s a distraction. I close my laptop. Tonight’s the night.

I don my headlamp and ear protection (vacuum cleaners are loud!), then switch off the lights. My lamp’s eery beam illuminates a mess of cobwebs — more than I’d even imagined! — and the long stringy shadows are sucked up by my power tool in an instant. I could be an extra in the next Ghostbusters, rounding up spooky dental floss. This is my favorite way to clean house … with play.

I’m not sure which is better — the fun, or the fact that I can transform what could be drudgery with my imagination. Have you ever noticed, though, that imagination rarely stays in your head? Thoughts do become things. In pursuit of fun, I once thought outside the box and seized the opportunity to better see our cobwebs with a headlamp. With ear protection on board, I’m almost in uniform. And who wouldn’t love waving a magic wand around in the dark to make cobwebs disappear?

Up until several years ago, I didn’t value joy so much. I was all in for the hard work, because I wanted to grow. I figured that meant getting to the bottom of things, coming clean.

Now I see spring cleaning differently. In pursuit of play, we can grow with joy. Creating and co-creating, we can sparkle up in new ways. Focusing clearly on what we want in the path before us, we can avoid tumbling into a thousand mud pits and skip a million days of soaking and sudsing to get clean again.

When have you played your way through daily work, transforming it into something you looked forward to?