By: Patricia Murphy
I’m busy cleaning these days. There are piles of clothes and papers and children’s things scattered in various places, most of it seeming from another lifetime, but in actuality, just this time last year. It’s a ritual I do most winters, clearing out the old and starting fresh. Growing up, my mother had my five brothers and sisters do it, on cold and dark January and February weekends, and so I have my daughter do it as well. We rummage through what we accumulated over the last year and sort them into three piles (throw out, give away, remain), in order to consciously choose what we keep in the promise of a new year. It’s both a practical and symbolic exercise, and affirmative, reminding us that at least on some level we control what surrounds us.
Like everything else, this time feels different.
In some ways, last year was the big pause, a suspended animation, with all of us waiting anxiously for the moment when we can press play, breathe a sigh of well-deserved relief and just resume. But this exercise of sifting through closets and drawers, bookshelves and cabinets has reminded me that there has been nothing dormant about our forced exile. Like other befores and afters – marriages, births, deaths – it has changed my perspective, redefining how I see and value life, including people, experiences and things. On some level, I’d love to get rid of everything – partially because I’m sick of seeing it every second of every day, but partially because my stuff reminds me that just ten months ago I functioned with a casual certainty about the permanence of “life as we know it,” and I’m a little humbled that I should have known better.
In fact, I did. Those of us familiar with grief, or who have spiritual faith, or are students of history understand that the only certainty of life is its impermanence. Yet somehow, with the allure of a drug, we can still get caught up in the pursuit of ‘more’: whether stuff or accomplishment or recognition.
Our forced ‘time out’ has laid bare the emptiness of much of that accumulation.
This year’s annual cleaning has made me realize I want less stuff, but more living, and feel an urgency to make up for lost time with action, clarity and purpose. I want deep and honest conversations with a small number of friends and have no interest in superficial contact with multitudes. I prize books and photos as family heirlooms, and now gravitate towards the comfortable, the slow, the communal.
My prayers are bigger now – and smaller too. They are for the health, safety and sanity of the world, and they are for us here in Greenwich as well, that we each consciously choose what we keep in whatever the next chapter brings. That we gain strength and courage from the certainty that, at least on some level, what surrounds us is up to us. And that we reorient our lives around its impermanence, so that we can appreciate each day – come what may – for the extraordinary and miraculous gift that it is.
