November 16, 2012
Clean-Up on Aisle Three
I get a little
perturbed when people don’t clean up after themselves. Such as if someone
decides to cook and not clean up the stove, and then proceeds to leave the
dirty dishes in the sink for someone else to put in the dishwasher. Yesterday I
was in the pantry and dropped a partial container of cornmeal. I was aggravated
at myself, but the thought did cross my mind, “I wonder what it would feel like to just leave it…maybe someone else
will clean it up.” Of course that someone else is going to be me, so
putting off cleaning it up didn’t make sense. Unfortunately messes are not limited
to just our physical space, but they can also be seen in the spiritual realm. The
Spirit really is the only One who can clean up our mess.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----It’s all the fault of mothers! I don’t mean they maliciously cleaned up everyone’s messes (including those of the adult child they married) just to ruin our characters, but I mean they are guilty of resigning to good sense and sound logic. They know that a mess in one place will be in that place for one moment. The next moment it will have spread to another place. So waiting for the guilty party to come home from work or school or play to clean the mess gives a sense of spread. Then Mom cleans the mess. The guilty party comes home and doesn’t even think about the mess, because somehow a sense of the mess being cleaned up struck their mind as soon as the mess was created. And if Mom yells, it only draws more attention to the mess's not being there.
-----I loved my Aunt Pat. She just gritted against my nerves all the time. She was so petty. Whenever I was finished with my dinner at her place, she would make me get up and wash my dish, silverware, and glass and leave them in the drainer. Everybody there had to do it. The effects of everything we did around Aunt Pat’s place had to be left in good order. And she always saw to these petty little things with a smile on her face. It felt so good to be responsible. My Mom was the servant. She did almost everything, even though she worked sometimes two jobs to make ends meet. It was so easy to take advantage of that. Yet in the background of my mind was always Aunt Pat, smiling, pecking at me to be responsible, invoking the guilt over my irresponsibility. In my mid twenties I began seeing to it that Aunt Pat would eventually win.
-----So, it really isn’t the fault of mothers. Aunt Pat was my cousin’s mother. It’s the fault of the kids, including the married one. There in my mid-twenties I became intrigued with how the mind and emotions worked by making sense of things, habits of senses, and drives of habits. It struck me heavily that the major differences in the ways people live their lives and the changes they can make in themselves start as believed thoughts. Which become beloved thoughts. Those in turn shape the paths of our lives. It’s up to the thinker to have his thoughts, to choose some and reject others, to love some and hold them close.
-----As one who once left messes, but is now drawn towards them (except for the ones involving leaky diapers or baby barf,) as much as I am thankful for all my messes cleaned up for me, I don’t wish to show ingratitude, but I’d rather have been beaten across the back until I cleaned them up myself. I think that would have been Dad’s duty.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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