Setting the Room

 In recent reading I stumbled across the idea of,"resetting the room." I believe it was in Atomic Habits. The basic concept is that before leaving a room you reset it to a state of prepared cleanliness. I imagine a living room full of books, movies, and comfortable places to sit. 

Picture this: A person comes into this living room. They bring with them a cup of hot cocoa and a small plate of cookies. They sit down in their favorite chair. They pull a cookbook down from the book shelf to do some meal planning. They grab a notebook and pen along with a remotes for the TV, DVD players, and surround sound system. 

Cookies are eaten. Cocoa is drank. Meals are planned. Notes are taken for grocery lists. Movies are watched. Music is listened to. Relaxation is achieved. 

What happens next? 

Well, if I were this person in my twenties then the room is left in that state. There is a 50% chance that includes leaving the plate and mug resting on the nearest to hand horizontal surface. Movie cases are likely stacked near the DVD player. Depending on my mood the TV may even be on. The remote controls are likely stuffed in the side of the chair or are resting on the plate. 

Over a few of these relaxing visits to the comfortable living room things get messy. Plates, cups, cans, bowls, books, remotes, and DVD cases pile up everywhere. Now the mess has become overwhelming and I take my relaxation in other places in the house which start to suffer the same messy fate waiting on me to gain the energy and motivation to, like some Martha Stewart possesed whirling dervish, tear through the entirety of the house cleaning. 

Weekends have oft been lost to these fits of a need to clean. Worse still, vacations have been taken with the intention of putting the house in order. In my thirties I figured out I was the problem. I started the basics of picking up after myself. I put the movies back on the shelves. I became a bit obsessive about keeping my bookcases in order. I still am not the best about dusting and detail cleaning, but in general most things get put back where they belong with the obvious exceptions of remote controls which I assert have a demonic life all their own. 

I have yet to devise any system where the remote is always where it is supposed to be. My Mom once had an end table where we affixed velcro to the side of it sized for each remote. Did the remotes always end up affixed to the side of the table? Of course not. That would be ludacris. They hid throughout the living room and the kitchen, but when you did find them to change a channel or play a movie they did have a pleasant fuzzy backing. 

Let's venture back to my resetting the room discovery. In that concept the person who enjoyed the living room would set it back to its clean and ready state after finishing using it. They would put up the movies and books. They would wipe down the surfaces. They would vacuum up any crumbs from the floor and furniture. The remotes would have a set place where they would be returned. 

With the living room reset the person would then proceed to the kitchen. Remaining cookies would be put away. Dishes would be washed, dried, and put away. The sink would be wiped down with any spillage cleaned up. The kitchen would be completely reset as well. 

This sounds like a time consuming way to live at first glance. Compared to the way I got used to making things work though you don't lose entire days, weekends, or vacations to it. Your home is kept in a perpetual state of clean preparedness with a few minutes spent resetting each area after use. That is incredibly appealing to me. It is the type of ease of living I want to practice and teach to my kids. It echoes a value of effortless effort that I respect a great deal. 

I could live that way. I know I could. There are some things standing in my way. I think of this mountain of work that I need to invest in as,'setting the room.' I need to take each room apart and clean and configure it to do away with unnecessary clutter and also maybe to locate all of my remote controls. Sneaky little buggers! 

I have been chewing this over in my head for months while doing very little about it. I mean do not mistranslate as complacency. Every few weeks I come up with a small set of improvements to my life. Moving all the camping gear out to my storage container helped declutter my bedroom significantly. It could be argued that there is value in having my sleeping bag in the house, but the three tents were certainly overkill. They all went to the storage shed. If we lose power and need sleeping bags, I will grab a flashlight and brave the weather to bring them in. The lack of clutter is worth the short walk of discomfort. 

Yesterday we began tackling something I like to call a ,'dishes situation.' These tend to happen somewhere between Wednesday and Friday. The dishes of a few busy mornings and one or two cooked meals pile up the counters and fill the sinks. It is overwhelming looking at it much less tackling the mess. It takes a few steadying breaths and some will power to plow through the dishes even though I know in my head that it won't take half and hour to get everything clean. 

I keep asking myself why, given how much this problem bugs me, I haven't found a way to not make it. The truth is for a while I didn't contribute to the mess. When Taila and Tyler lived with us I decided to stop using the dishes from the kitchen. My reasons for this were petty and a little silly, but I was trying to show that the amount of cleaning around the house was not in alignment to the people who were making the messes. My logic was that if I could go a few weeks of not cleaning because I was not contributing to the mess that other people would get fed up with the mess and gain some conviction to clean up. 

This was not a well thought out plan. It failed completely. I eventually wanted to cook something and could not stand to do so with the sinks and counters full of messy often smelly dishes. Then I really resented cleaning them knowing that my personal dishes and silverware were cleanly tucked away in a plastic container in my bedroom. I tried complaining. I tried fussing. Nothing work. Eventually my Dad said,' Just shut the f*$& up and wash the dishes.' This infuriated me further, but I took the advice. I shut up and just tried to keep ahead of the dishes. 

That mostly worked better. I also maintained my habit of using my own set of dishes for a while. When you only have 1 fork, 1 spoon, 1 knife, 1 bowl, 1 spoon, and 1 mug to eat from then you are forced to clean them before you use them again. By limiting what I allowed myself to use I did stop making major contributions to the mess. Little did I know Dad was practicing the same thing. 

With Taila and Tyler moved out last year my habits changed a bit. We went back to piling the sink up. The set of dishes I had kept in the bedroom packed out with my camp gear. The mess in and around the sink generally was better, but in several months it hasn't ever been truly under control. When I was working on the dishes yesterday I could see how many of my cereal bowls were contributing to the problem. Why had I fallen off of a good wagon?

The reality is that I am going to take the path of least resistance in any type of stressful situation. If I am grabbing breakfast while checking in with my team at work and reading through email before diving into my first meeting of the day then I am unlikely to stop and wash my bowl and spoon. I leave it there with good intentions. I honestly plan that I will wash it at lunch. 

The catch is that I am normally grabbing lunch quickly before dashing out the door to pick Teagan up from school or in the very small amount of free time I have between meetings. My days are too full of things to do during the week to set aside 20 minutes to prep and devour lunch. This is why it is much easier to have leftovers on hand or to make a half sandwich. 

By the time supper rolls around I typically make more of a mess in the kitchen. Sometimes I clean up after myself. Often I give myself the excuse that a bowl and a few plates will not take long to clean up later. Also, there are always more clean plates in the cabinet and more clean silverware in the drawer. That remains true until the weekend when the mess is out of control and I typically don't want to deal with it mentally. 

As I did a quick load of dishes this morning cleaning up from the barbeque chicken over whole grain rice I made last night I was reminded of the proximate cause of the problem. I have too many plates, cups, and silverware. I would bet we have 35 forks. I am betting on fifteen or so plates in my cabinet. I know I have half a dozen Pyrex bowls and another half dozen regular bowls all of which get pressed into service regularly. 

We never planned to have this much in the kitchen cabinets (or sinks.) There has been a few combining of households happen over the years. We have replaced a few sets of dishes after pieces got broken without removing the rest of the sets. Mom also loved yard sales and quite a few sets of things, or partial sets, made their way into the house without anything coming out. 

I need to cull my kitchen. In the wisdom of my friend Jennifer I need to," Throw that $h!t out." If I culled down to a reasonable amount of dishes and cutlery I could barely fill the sink much less the counter without doing some extravagant cooking. That would be pretty unlikely given that my diet (I am not calling it an eating plan because diet is not a dirty word to me yet) focuses quite a bit on eating quality whole foods prepared simply. I also like focusing on one pot meals. Sometimes my natural inclination at laziness is good for me. 

Honestly, I need to starve myself for choices throughout my life. I have half a dozen art books I am practicing my art from. Many days I will spend half an hour thumbing through them looking for a project that calls to me and occasionally discard it all just to sketch something out of my own head. If I picked one and worked it cover to cover without deviation I would have little trouble picking something to draw or learning graduated lessons. 

Yes, this is boring to me. Some days I want to practice with markers or pencil shading. Sometimes I want the challenge of something complex while others I want to sketch out something super simple. That is the why behind why I have some many art books for reference in the first place. It doesn't help though if I find myself paralyzed by too many options. 

When I first started sketching I was starved for reference material. Quite a few of the pieces of art in my video game manuals were too complicated for my beginning skills. I moved to comic book cards for reference as soon as Marvel Series I came out. I still have those out in my storage container. I wonder how much value those cards would give me in inspiring me to sketch now. That might be my next project. 

I had years of art materials built up. I was going through a phase in minimalism and gave most of it away to a friend who is a talented artist. When I got back into the hobby I bought a few things, but in comparison to what I had then I am working with very minimalist tools... except for alcohol based markers. I got the major hook up there at Christmas. I even got to appreciate the difference between fine point and brush point in Arteza markers. 

I have read enough about the positive mental effects of minimalism to know it appeals to me. I also understand that if I use smaller plates, cups, and bowls that it becomes easier to control my serving size. As I have been sick, I have added orange juice to my breakfast in the morning. I normally only drink water, but the additional sugar and vitamin C are helpful in giving me the energy to push through my days. I know that drinking this from a small juice glass is smarter than pouring it into a 32 ounce tumbler. Eight ounces of juice produces the result I need. Thirty-two ounces would too but not far times more. Orange Juice isn't cheap so I don't want to catch myself enjoying it just for the taste.  God forbid.

I think I am going to pack up the excess dishes and temporarily drop them into my storage container. If we live better without them then I will donate them to charity around June or July. I have some other places in my life where I can simplify and downsize as well. I might eventually get all these rooms set and be able to practice room resetting. Cannot blame me for dreaming, right?