Spring Cleaning
A Natural
Occurrence
As the weather has finally decided
to be above sixty degrees two days in a row, it actually feels like spring is
finally here in reality as well as the calendar. Naturally, this means Spring
Cleaning. But why does it mean Spring Cleaning? Cleaning is more common in the
animal world than one might assume at first. Over the course of a single day a
bee can gather 5 times its weight in pollen (1). Therefore, they must regularly
clean the excess pollen off their bodies by using their back legs to bend the
hairs on their body down and then allow them to spring back up, which launches
the pollen off of them (1).
What do song birds and rattlesnakes have
in common? They both like to clean. Birds regularly clean their nests by flying
haul packets of their young’s poop and drop it far away, which while it annoys
humans, keeps the nest clean as well as safe (2). If the poop isn’t removed it
can alert predators of the nest’s location. Although people probably don’t
associate snakes with cleanliness, that’s simply not true. For one,
rattlesnakes have been found to regularly clean messy grass from their hunting
areas to get a better view of prey (2).
How to Stay Motivated
However, you are not a rattlesnake or a
song bird and don’t have the motivation of hunger, if you can’t see your prey
you can’t eat, or fear of being eaten, because you drew attention to your nest.
So how are you going to stay motivated while you banish the dust bunnies from
your house’s nooks and crannies?*
First,
Why are you Doing this?
No, seriously why are you Spring
Cleaning? Can you no longer find anything in the pile of papers that has become
your desk? Then you are trying to make your self more organized and therefore,
your work time more productive, because you won’t have to search for those
assignment guidelines, that letter, or your darn pencil. If you can’t even
answer now, before you begin, why you are Spring Cleaning it’s going to be much
more difficult to remain motivated.
Second:
Plan Ahead
You know yourself. You know you’re going
to get demotivated, and distracted. What are you going to do when this happens?
I make a checklist to keep myself on track and plan a reward to look forward to
after I finish so many things on the list.
Third:
Set a Goal
Don’t just say you’ll clean your house.
Be specific! What are you going to clean? The windows, the bathrooms, the
walls, organize the closet that by now definitely could have monsters in it and
you wouldn’t even know, or the kitchen floor, which you think used to be cream,
but now definitely looks light brown, and not a pretty light brown either? The more specific you are the easier this is
going to be. Cleaning the whole house sounds daunting, but not if you can look
at the individual parts, which brings me to the fourth step.
Fourth:
Break it Down
If you break your goals down into
their parts, your task will seem less intimidating. Plus, then you can feel a
genuine sense of accomplishment for each little thing you accomplish. Maybe you
don’t want to clean the bathroom (me!), but it’s actually only the toilet that
you mind. Maybe you don’t mind cleaning the mirrors. If you put off cleaning
the entire bathroom, because of that one component part you will feel even less
accomplished. On the other hand if you clean the mirrors and the sinks, then
you can use that accomplishment high to get you through cleaning the dreaded
toilet. I lists before in how I use them to stay focused at the end of the semester in a previous post.
History of Spring Cleaning
Back in the 1800s, when electricity
wasn’t as much of a household thing, people used lamps with whale oil or
kerosene (4). They also heated their homes with wood or coal fires, which
created soot and ended up everywhere. By the time the winter months were over,
it wasn’t just a little bit of dust, but rather a coating of soot on everything.
When it finally got warmer**, women scrub the dust off what they could
(windows, floors etc.) , and whack it out of what they couldn’t scrub (rugs,
blankets, etc) (4).
But Spring Cleaning also predates,
the 1800s. In fact, Nowruz, the Persian New Year, has been celebrated for
thousands of years. One of the first mentions of it come from around the 3rd
century B.C. from Xenophon, a Greek scholar, where he mentions the celebrations
taking place in the Persian Empire (5) Nowruz is still celebrated today, most
popularly in Iran. Three weeks before the actual Nowruz celebrations, it is
tradition for people to clean their houses (6). Just like in the 1800s, women
will take rugs outside and beat the dust out of them and then scrub them.
What I did/Will Do***
As it’s finally getting warmer, I
went through my closet and reorganized it. Washing and then pulling out my
summer clothes, I rotated everything so that they are the easiest to access and
my jackets are in the sub-optimal position in the corner. This way, when I
reach for a tank top there aren’t four sweaters in my way.
On the other hand, I still need to a
lot of things like straighten up my books and return others to the library or
their respective bookstores. Once the semester is over, I’m going to go through
the piles of papers and throw out the papers I don’t need. Then I’ll reorganize
my binders for my last semester at college. But I’ll probably wash the bedding
to freshen it up, before I get to that.
Let
me know in the comments what Spring Cleaning you did/want to do. Be specific in
those goals!
Notes:
*These tips are
all from (3)
** A thing I can
definitely sympathize with it freaking snowing multiple times in the past
couple of weeks.
*** cough
cough…get on that Julia…cough cough
Sources:
(1) Netburn, Debora. "Dangerous Dirt: Why the animal world is obsessed with being clean." on Latimes.com
(5) Christopher
Tuplin; Vincent Azoulay, Xenophon and His World: Papers from a Conference Held
in Liverpool in July 1999, Published by Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004, ISBN
3-515-08392-8, p.148.
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