The Stuff We Never Get Round To…

Written by: Jorinde Berben
Image credit: Jorinde Berben

There’s a glass in my dishwasher. It’s a drinking glass that held a shoot of a plant for a long time, waiting for it to grow some roots. Due to the water sitting in it, it now has lots of calcium on the inside, that no dishwasher is ever going to get off. And yet, it’s still sitting in my dishwasher, and it has been taken out, placed to the side for special cleaning, and placed back in the dishwasher as I was cleaning the kitchen at least 6 times over.

This is a very small thing, but I happen to have lots of these very small things around my house. The books on my nightstand that I have stopped reading, the clothes in my closet I’ve stopped wearing, the towel rack in the bathroom that broke over a year ago. “Someday I’ll get to it!” I catch myself thinking over and over again, and yet, every time I pass by these things they take up mental energy. They take up space in my mind.

I have it with small things in my life, but there are big things that I don’t get around to doing as well. I’ve been planning to renovate my bathroom for years (5 years to be exact). And sure, during that time there have been plenty of good reasons to postpone it (divorce, my partner moving, financial reasons, being depressed), but it’s also been eating away at me for all those years.

And sometimes we do the same with really major parts of our lives: we tell ourselves we’ll change jobs when we’ve paid off the house, or we’ll deal with our relationship issues when the kids move out. One day we’ll book that trip to Egypt, maybe even next year. And next year we press repeat.

And somehow, it all starts with that cup in the dishwasher, doesn’t it?
I’m going to clean it today!