Day 97

June! New month. New possibilities. Hope for healthy activity and attitude. I made a nutrition rich salad from four kinds of kale, lemon from my tree, garlic, avocado, and horseradish mustard. All mashed together into about a third of their original size. I can feel the iron and calcium running through my blood helping to restore bones and organs that were depleted by donating blood. My ferritin is 75. Tonda says I may not get a higher value than that.

Senior News

Have you considered the spiritual value of a thorough and relentless housecleaning? Let's consider the closet that repository of deeply held beliefs, hopes, histories, and identity. Recently I took a ruthless approach to who I am, how I live, what I plan to do in the future, how I want to present myself, my personal preferences, and how I feel about myself. I sat on the closet floor and looked at the accumulation of many years and realized that some serious changes were about to happen. I took everything out of the closet. In my house includes a shoe storage unit, a five drawer chest, a couple of protective suit covers, a plastic storage unit with ten shelves, and five big cardboard storage boxes, plus all the hangers, skirt hangers, pants hangers, many of which were double used. My, what a roomy place with all that stuff now stacked and piled on the floor of the living room, and on the furniture. I cleaned every inch. The back wall hadn't seen daylight in at least a decade. Then came the sorting according to the criteria: what do I want to own at this time in my life? Through this frame of reference I viewed each item before either putting it in the St. Vincent DePaul pile, the garbage pile, the used clothes store, or the back in the closet pile.

            I will admit to a few tears when I put some favorite work outfits in the discard pile, but they no longer fit who I am. I had memories and daydreams of the good times when I wore them last and then moved on. Out went all the low self-esteem clothes, shoes with holes, socks that don't match, underwear with stretched out elastic, things I've bought impulsively and have kept because I think I should, gift clothing that I never really used, things that are too big or too small and maybe will be useful someday, and that big category; articles that still have a lot of wear left in them! Out, OUT, OUT! I made sure to get all the personally unusable stuff out of the house immediately before I could sneak anything back in because I do not want to hold on the past, the useless, the reminders of unfinished business, and plans that did not bear fruit.

I have few things stored away. My life now is about the possibilities of each day, and the opportunity to explore everything. So maybe closet cleaning isn't a search for the meaning of life, but I challenge you to shake out and tidy up your private spaces without learning a lot about who you are and how you are living your life.