Yesterday I took on the Big Question of free will vs. fate. Today I’m talking about cleaning out my Sonicare toothbrush. No one can accuse me of being in a rut!
Here’s the thing: The inside of the head of this appliance gets gunked up with this black stuff, toothpaste residue, and it drives me crazy. ( Yes, I do rinse out the bristles. It still happens.) So I periodically spend 10 minutes or so cleaning it out with q-tips, but at some point it’s just hopeless. Recently I replaced the head, as you’re supposed to do every three months (but who does that, really?) and I determined that I was going to keep it clean. So now, every time I use it, twice a day. I unscrew the top from the base, rinse it out inside, and shake out the water before screwing it back on. Takes about 30 seconds, tops. So far it seems to be staying clean. No more black gunk. A good illustration, once again, of the principle that it’s easier to keep up than it is to catch up. (I will spare you the description of how awful my sink stopper gets because I let hairs go down the drain instead of cleaning them out. You don’t want to know about that, believe me.)
You can see this concept all around you. Lately, for instance, I’ve been making myself pull out the tiny weeds in the four o’clock beds as I water them every single morning. It’s so tempting to think, ‘Oh well, I’ll come back at some point and go over them all,’ when in reality it’s so much easier to just keep up with them. Same idea with that dirty plate from lunch, and the discarded lettuce leaves, etc. Pretty soon the nice clean kitchen looks like a war zone. (I said to Jim recently as I gazed upon the detritus spread all over the counters, “This is the result of one day of neglect!”)
This type of thinking, this idea that somehow it will be better to wait and do a great big job instead of doing a little job right now stems from a procrastinator’s mindset. Peg Bracken, in her great classic The I Hate to Housekeep Book, gives the following sterling advice:
Act immediately on whatever housewifely impulses come your way.
Being but destiny’s plaything, you must seize upon the moment when you notice that something needs doing, and do it, with whatever you have at hand to do with with. Say, for instance, that you notice a little jam on the woodwork. Now, this curiously specialized age of ours has produced a specific cleaner or polisher for anything you care to name. With this in the back of her mind, the random housewife tends to rationalize herself out of wiping the jam off the woodwork until she gets a box of that new woodwork stuff she was hearing about, at which improbable time (she thinks grandly) she’ll do all the woodwork in the whole house. However, a damp dishrag rubbed on a simple cake of soap will help a great deal in this situation, and in a lot of other situations too (17-18). (Although this book was written in 1962, it still rings true today in many ways.)
All those horrid little jobs become vastly more horrid when they pile up: checking the charge slips against the bank statement, doing the filing, doing the laundry, paying the bills, etc. etc. How satisfying to stay on top of them!