Rick's November Tirade
The Tao of Housekeeping
One of the few principles of high-school physics that I remember
with pleasure is the law of entropy. Simply stated, entropy is the
natural tendency of things to fall apart over time... to dissipate,
scatter and get messy beyond repair. It's a law that makes every
cynic beam inwardly with satisfaction even as he grits his teeth in
protest. Entropy rules, and the world is indeed a mess.
Just look at the evidence. Empires crumble. Businesses and
tenements collapse. Relationships break down. Human bodies sag with
age. Pop music and public mores seem to grow more detestable with
each passing decade. Keys and socks lose themselves of their own
volition. Even the mighty Himalayas are mere transients in the vast
rooming house of geological time. And eventually the sun itself will
sputter out like a bad furnace. The universe is in a continual state
of decline, and there's little we can do about it.
Of course, some people choose to do something about it. They keep
a clean house.
An immaculate abode is one of the cherished ideals of
middle-class life. It's not enough to accumulate things; those
things must be kept spotless and, if possible, alphabetically
arranged. Dishes must be washed, floors cleaned, carpets vacuumed,
houseplants watered, knick-knacks dusted, bathtubs scrubbed, pots
scoured, closets organized, files filed, pets brushed, and dead
insects delicately swept away (or fed to the pets).
By imposing order on their domiciles, these industrious folks
gain a temporary foothold in the struggle against entropy. They're
doing battle against the forces of disintegration and deterioration.
They're fighting a valiant fight against the laws of nature, and I
suppose they've earned the right to be pleased with themselves.
Not me. I've never been overly fussy about the orderliness of my
surroundings -- possibly because I've never shown much aptitude for
doing anything about it. If we measured housekeeping skills on
standardized exams, I might score somewhere around the 20th
percentile. No matter how ferociously I scrub a floor, it never
comes clean. Out, damned spot! Out, I say! But always a few spots
remain. Or a few stray hairs. Or a crumb of English muffin. And
almost always my occasional visitors will glance in that precise
direction.
"Ignore that crumb," I feel like telling them.
"Check my kitchen counter -- no crumbs there! And regard the
cleanliness of my bookcase. Entirely devoid of crumbs." But no,
they've seen all they need to see. Word will get around that I have
crumbs.
Between visitors, I'm generally content to watch the law of
entropy do its thing. Unread bills and junk mail pile up on the
coffee table, then spill over and transform themselves into
advancing glaciers of paper. Ditto for the catalogs and magazines on
the sofa. Books seem to leap from the shelves and settle in random
stacks on the floor. Dust-bunnies proliferate in the nooks and
crannies of every room, especially where they're hardest to reach.
The area around my computer is so deep in printouts that a small
mammal could get buried there.
What can I do? I'm a cleaning-challenged individual. I've
resigned myself to clutter as a fact of life. Besides, we have
little enough time to live without squandering it on the removal of
crumbs and dust-bunnies.
When I arrive home from work in the evening, I want to tackle my
top priorities: eating, walking, recovering my sanity, and
responding to e-mail. That doesn't leave much time for other worthy
pursuits like reading H.L. Mencken, conversing at the local coffee
house, watching old W.C. Fields movies, or doing housework. If I had
to eliminate just one of the above, guess which one it would be.
For I have observed that housework is a depressing and ultimately
futile affair. Clean the kitchen, and within three days it needs to
be cleaned again. Food particles, cat fur, dust, dishes, grubby
utensils, splotches of dried tomato sauce, twist-ties, papers,
pennies, plastic bags -- all conspire with the law of entropy to
engender a state of rapid and inexorable deterioration. In short,
the kitchen you just cleaned is already a mess.
The law of entropy is triumphant: whatever is maintained through
effort invariably falls apart by itself. We must repeat the same
process endlessly, like Sisyphus in Hades. Roll it up the hill,
watch it roll down. Roll it up again, watch it roll down again.
We're trapped in an endless cycle of maintenance and disrepair.
Where is the Buddha of housekeeping to deliver us from this eternal
drudgery? We seek relief, O enlightened one! Show us the way to
Nirvana.
Perhaps the answer lies not so much in Buddhism as in Taoism.
Faced with a messy apartment, the old sage Lao-tze would calmly go
with the flow. No resistance, no busywork, no distress, no mopping.
Just let it be, he'd tell us, and you will overcome it.
Of course, Lao-tze had no junk mail or magazines to clutter up
his living room, and he never spilled tomato sauce on the kitchen
counter. But the essential wisdom remains: it is useless to fight
entropy. We have better things to do with our lives.
If Taoism doesn't convince you, I offer yet another reason for
avoiding housework: when the universe stops expanding and starts
shrinking back toward its origins, the laws of nature might operate
in reverse. Time would move backward. We'd be reborn into old age
and die at birth. Apples would fall up. All homes would naturally
tend toward cleanliness.
And where does that leave those of us who struggle with housework
today? It means we can leave the stacks of paper on the coffee
table, the spots on the kitchen floor, the mummified vegetables in
the back of the refrigerator. We're free to rejoice and create
disarray. In a few eons, everything will pick up after itself. I can
hardly wait.
