My brain is constantly on the go. It doesn’t really know how to turn off. If I’m weeding the garden, it’s spinning in a dozen different directions, thinking about projects I want to work on and things I read in the news and what to make for dinner and how to plan out the latest arrangement of the living room and whether Loki has enough food to get through the rest of the week or if I should go to town. When I get ready for bed at night, I lie awake flooded with ideas that woosh around in my head, and I let them churn about for a while, slowly, gradually spinning down until I can follow one thread into sleep, because I’ve learned from past experience that attempting to force my brain into quiescence doesn’t work at all. I just have to go with the flow.
Sometimes the buzzing and demands for attention and thoughts become too overwhelming and I feel like I’m going to explode with all the things happening inside my brain. This is the point where I bring out the, so to speak, big guns, the most effective and delicious way of calming my brain: cleaning and organising. There’s something about organising that allows me to concentrate just on what I am doing. For me, it’s a form of meditation, because it brings my brain back to center, back to an even keel, back to a place where I feel like I am in control again, instead of being driven madcap all over the landscape by whatever is whirling around in my mind.
I’ll spend a whole day organising, if I can get away with it. Most people wouldn’t notice an appreciable change if they looked at the before and after, but I can see the difference. The bookshelves carefully taken apart and wiped down, books replaced with precisely the right spacing between each other and from the front of the shelves. Spices realphabetised and faced out again, pantry carefully arranged, rug reoriented just so, storage loft neatly brought back into order again.
I can feel the edges of my brain calming as I bring things back into order, even though people might think they were already orderly to begin with. In a way, my house is like my brain; on the surface, it appears very neatly organised with a precise place for everything, but over time, things are ever so slightly shifted, things are not quite right, and I get increasingly unsettled and restless until I throw everything out onto the middle of the floor and start all over again, carefully replacing things just so and getting rid of bits I don’t need and making sure everything is arranged before I like it, so the slow slide off center can start all over again.
It took me years to understand that other people didn’t operate like this, that my need to rearrange furniture and go on a cleaning and tidying spree every three months or so was viewed as deeply strange by many of the people around me, who were happy to settle into dust and things slightly out of order, who didn’t mind when the living room chair shifted six inches to the right or the table developed a few rings from mistakenly placed hot drinks. I think that for me this was the first inkling that there was something about my brain that was different, that for me cleaning and organising created a calming oasis where I felt balanced and in control, and I would get terribly upset when people interrupted it or failed to understand the importance.
Growing up, you start to learn that the people around you are different and it can be jarring and upsetting as you see that your normal is not their normal; that cleaning the grout in the shower with a toothbrush is peculiar, by many people’s estimations, that other people don’t find it soothing to contemplatively and carefully scrub the sink to remove all traces of staining and leave it smooth and polished again, that no everyone mops the floors by hand with a sponge and a frequently-changed bucket of water to be sure to get all the dirt. Not everyone has items so carefully arranged in the house that a move of only a few centimetres is instantly detectable, a sign that something is wrong and someone has been there and something is off centre.
And not everyone has a brain that goes, all the time, this was the hardest lesson of all for me to learn as a child, and later, growing up, when people wanted to do things like send me on vacation and I didn’t know what to do. What could I do on a sand beach? I could count the trees and classify the rocks, or swim and think about projects, or I could organise the dishes in the rental house and scrub the grill and meticulously sweep the porch to make sure not a single leaf stays on it for more than an hour, but this thing, relaxing, in the form many people think of it, is alien to me. For me the best vacation is one where I get to clean and organise and whirl around with delight as my brain settles down.
Relaxing is throwing myself into an epic cleaning and organising project, completly redoing how I arrange my furniture or deciding to organise my trousers differently or putting together a spice chest or deciding how I want to arrange my storage jars in the kitchen, or changing the order of my library to make my reference books more logical. This is cleansing. This is calming. This is happiness, for me.
