The Living Fully Challenge

Just like last month, apply this part of the month’s assignment to the following 12 general areas of your daily life — finance, romantic relationship, free time/fun, health/exercise, work/career, spiritual practice/relationship with God, friendship, relationship with self, relationship with family, continuing education, charity and care of the Earth, and commitments/responsibilities.

This month, in each of the 12 general areas of your daily life, you must clean up a mess. (This is the house cleaning to which I alluded.)  This means completing something you’ve left incomplete or beginning a job that needs to get done.

The house you are cleaning is your life. On an even deeper level, the house symbolizes you. You are cleaning up your life and yourself. How do you do this? By cleaning up the mess in one area of your life and yourself at a time.

For example, in the area of finances, maybe you haven’t balanced your check book in the last six months or filed your paid bills. Handle it. Or maybe you haven’t checked in with your financial advisor or looked at when your life insurance needs to be renewed. Do it.

Take a look through the dirty window or your romantic relationships (actually, clean it first…), and take a look around.  Have you, for instance, left hurt feelings unhealed? Don’t continue covering them up with a bandage; actually expose the sore to the air and put some salve on it so the open wound heals.

What about in the area of free time and fun? That seems like a mess free area, but have you possibly started an activity you never finished? Either decide you aren’t going to follow through and give away the equipment you purchased — you know, the rollerblades and helmet lying on the floor of the garage — or put them on and commit to using them three times a week. Or that easel and paint in the corner of the living room…take a look at the painting you began. Will you ever complete it? Either pick up the brush and paint for 30 minutes at least once a week, or put the art supplies in the attic. (Better yet, give them to someone who will use them, like some young child with dreams of being an artist one day.)

As for health and exercise, that’s easy: Uncover the treadmill in your bedroom — that’s right, stop using it as a place to hang the clothes that aren’t so dirty they can’t be worn a second time, and actually get on it every morning for 20 minutes. Or pack that thing up and sell it at the local used exercise equipment store.

The area of work/career provides ample area for clean up: Just look at that never ending to-do list. What items on that list have you started but never finished? Make them your top priority. Look around your office, what needs to be filed, organized, put in the circular file? Check your email box. How many of those 538 new emails, 689 sent emails, and 5,367 old emails can you clean out or organize?

I think you get the idea. You can probably find ample opportunities for “house cleaning” in the other seven categories as well, plus many more I haven’t mentioned in the five I’ve used as examples. Just look around in each category. Rub off a little place in each room’s window, or actually clean the whole window so you can see clearly, and you’ll find at least one mess you can clean up. Possibly its an actual physical mess. It could be a nonphysical one as well. You’ll know it when you see it though. It will be something dirty, dingy, and a bit smelly. But when you are done, that category will be a bit cleaner, shinier and sweeter smelling.

And you’ll feel oh, so good . . . and cleaner, too. You’ll feel enlivened with the sense of accomplishment. You’ll know your “house” is a bit cleaner than it was 30 days ago.

And when we keep our living spaces — interior and exterior — free of mess, we can focus our attention on the really important things: filling them with the things we really want and living in them fully.