Be mindful. Tend your portion of the world

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What does slow housekeeping mean in a culture that feeds on instant gratification?  How does home provide a safe haven--in  a world that moves too fast and demands too much? 

On social media, we record our public triumphs—the tantalizing meal, the perfect vacation, the pack of smiling friends—trying so hard to be special that we  cease to value ordinary life.  If you're bored with your persona, or with endless competition, spend a few hours cleaning up the living room.  My tip of the day: Household chores are the quickest antidote to personality overdrive and digital fatigue.  

The psychiatrist C. G. Jung believed caring for the home was deeply therapeutic, a kind of slow medicine that gave people a rest from their ambition, connecting them to age-old patterns of restoration and renewal.  In the 1930s, he built a good portion of his country house by hand,  using tools designed in the Middle Ages. When in residence, he spent long hours in the kitchen, fanning the fire with leather bellows, and tending to his pots and pans.  

An American colleague visited Jung in 1958, entering through a heavy wooden door in the middle of a thick stone wall. Inside she found a strong bodied, white-haired 83-year-old in a green workman’s apron, chopping wood. “I have found the way to live here as part of nature, to live in my own time," Jung told her. “People are always living as if something better is about to happen…They don’t think to live their lives!” 

The father of evolutionary psychology, Jung felt that household tasks kept us human and kept us down to earth.  He worried about our addiction to speed and abstract thinking and warned about the dangers of technology. He had a point. Dependent on our new devices, we now have little interaction with our physical environment. Instead we spend the day crouched over a computer, relying on Alexa to order the groceries, Roomba to do the vacuuming, and GPS to guide the car.  

Yet here's the funny thing:  Housework provides a wonderful confirmation of our usefulness in a robot-driven world. While we've managed to automate everything from piloting a plane to building a truck, dusting and vacuuming are two of the tasks done best by humans!  The reason: Scientists have been unable to create a bot with the right motor skills to deal with fragile objects and get into the tight corners.   

We also seem to need to remember it's just plain good for the body to get up and move.  Housecleaning is great exercise. When we get down to it, the mop, dust cloth, and broom become an extension of our limbs. We grow more aware of the rhythm of our breathing, the subliminal lubdub of our heartbeat.  Our nerves are soothed by the sound of running water, our noses pick up the sweet scent of polish, our fingers are enthralled by the smooth consistency wax.  Jung was right: We come back to our senses when we tackle these basic tasks.

Housekeeping grounds us psychologically as well. How? By offsetting our fascination with extraversion, ego-image, and end result. In our current cultural meme, every impulse is directed "out there"--into compiling enough followers and friends, asserting our opinions, making the next deal. That's why those unsung moments we spend washing dishes, putting away our clothes, tidying the living room, matter.  They give us time for wool gathering, dallying and daydreaming. For coming home to our true selves.    

Finally, home-making provides an antidote to the kind of knee-jerk narcissism we see in nearly every aspect of public  life.  Our society might be better off if all Americans had to clean up after themselves. No exceptions. Who can be power-hungry or inflated when mopping up the kitchen floor and washing out a pair of socks?

The word homely has come to mean something that is ugly or unattractive. Yet originally it called our attention to the unadorned, the simple. Homemaking is related to the practice of humility, the process of slowing down and noticing. Acknowledging that we are here to love and serve.

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What chore can you do mindfully today? Remember that as you tend the house, you also mend a portion of the world.

Illustrations by Ann Arnold.