Clean

Last year my college roommates loved the fact that when I feel stressed, I clean. (That is, they loved it until I started to take their personal belongings out of our apartment living room and throw them into their bedroom, where the law of entropy was on magnificent display.)

            When life feels intractable, there is something about bringing order to the little I can control, if only the apartment living room, that I find mollifying. Perhaps that is why this past week I have compulsively cleaned the Volunteer Reception Center, emailed my boss that we were being smothered by six red wheelbarrows left in our work space, and could usually be found straightening stacks of papers or creating new filing systems.

            Until I realized that the Volunteer Reception Center is too big of an operation for a single person to control, and that no one expected me to be that person anyways, the Volunteer Reception Center felt out of control.

            So I cleaned. In retrospect, it may seem a little ridiculous that after my coworkers and I found out on Friday afternoon that we had been tasked with setting up an operational Volunteer Reception Center by Tuesday morning the first thing I do is to find the glass cleaner and clean the windows. Or that when no one could find the trailer keys I was rearranging the cream and sugar packets.

            Learning to trust my coworkers over the week has liberated me from much impulse cleaning, straightening and sorting, and has attenuated my illusion of control. I have come to revel in the fact that I do not have to know all the dirty details of the Volunteer Reception Center, and to revel in the concomitant mess while I’m at it.