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Pesach is coming. The bread is getting flat.
Pesach starts on Wednesday night which means that my flat has to be chametz free (apart from the chametz we're putting away which will belong to Alec over Pesach) by Wednesday morning. Actually, the requirements to rip the flat of chametz isn't as strenuous as most Jews make is. All you need is to attempt to ensure that any crumbs which might have found their way into stuff are made inedible. This can be fulfilled just by spraying cleaner because you wouldn't eat crumbs soaked in detergent. Lots of Jews turn Pesach prep into a mammoth Spring clean which begins a month before Pesach. Mine has been more low key and I don't think that cleaning the flat could take a month given that it only has three rooms (four if you include the little hall).
Anyway the cleaning is supposed to be a sort of physical meditation, where your physical actions mimic a spiritual reality. Chametz is a symbol of spiritual impediments, particularly arrogance. Over Pesach we try to clear it all out. OK, there wasn't much chametz in the rooms I was cleaning yesterday but there might have been chametz in the dust, which there was quite a bit of.
So, lessons from Peach cleaning:
1) You don't realise how dusty/grimy the place is until you make the effort to lot, or at least I don't. I am very good at not seeing mess which drives Alec mad. I think the world is made up of people who see the mess and are constantly bothered by it and people who don't and live their lives more comfortably don't have such tidy spaces. (I also sometimes wonder how things dirty in the way they are.)
2) Cleaning isn't as bad as you think it will be. I remember a couple of summers ago a friend of mine announced that she cleaned her wheelie bin that day and it wasn't as bad as she'd thought it would be. In her imagination the bin had become a horrific ordeal of filth but actually once she had poured enough bleach into it the whole process wasn't that bad and at the end of it she had the satisfaction of a massive clean bin. It took me a lot less time to clean that I thought it would take.
3) You gotta disturb all of the dust and some of it will just settle elsewhere. There's a sort of Cat in the Hat quality to cleaning. When you dust, some of it will just settle elsewhere; when you wipe, you spread the grime into new places. It's impossible to get everything spotless but little by little more ends up in the mop bucket and the vacuum cleaner and you can have the satisfaction of pouring it down the toilet or into the skip.
4) Relatedly, it's better if you open the windows. It makes it more likely that some of the dust will fall outside and it makes you less likely to pass out from the fumes of whatever you're using. There's something else which I can't place my finger on, I guess it's just airing everything out.
5) Spiders. There were a few spiders in the bathroom. The spiders are there presumably because shower rooms attract flies. Spiders eat flies but make webs and spider poo, which is messy. So you have to make a decision, You could get rip of the spiders along with all of the rest of the mess, but then when things get messy again if the flies come back there's nothing left to deal with them. So you have to make a decision, in the long term, am I going to better off with the spiders and the problems they cause or without them. I decided to leave the spiders but clean away the mess they'd made.
So, that's my lessons from Pesach cleaning.
Pesach starts on Wednesday night which means that my flat has to be chametz free (apart from the chametz we're putting away which will belong to Alec over Pesach) by Wednesday morning. Actually, the requirements to rip the flat of chametz isn't as strenuous as most Jews make is. All you need is to attempt to ensure that any crumbs which might have found their way into stuff are made inedible. This can be fulfilled just by spraying cleaner because you wouldn't eat crumbs soaked in detergent. Lots of Jews turn Pesach prep into a mammoth Spring clean which begins a month before Pesach. Mine has been more low key and I don't think that cleaning the flat could take a month given that it only has three rooms (four if you include the little hall).
Anyway the cleaning is supposed to be a sort of physical meditation, where your physical actions mimic a spiritual reality. Chametz is a symbol of spiritual impediments, particularly arrogance. Over Pesach we try to clear it all out. OK, there wasn't much chametz in the rooms I was cleaning yesterday but there might have been chametz in the dust, which there was quite a bit of.
So, lessons from Peach cleaning:
1) You don't realise how dusty/grimy the place is until you make the effort to lot, or at least I don't. I am very good at not seeing mess which drives Alec mad. I think the world is made up of people who see the mess and are constantly bothered by it and people who don't and live their lives more comfortably don't have such tidy spaces. (I also sometimes wonder how things dirty in the way they are.)
2) Cleaning isn't as bad as you think it will be. I remember a couple of summers ago a friend of mine announced that she cleaned her wheelie bin that day and it wasn't as bad as she'd thought it would be. In her imagination the bin had become a horrific ordeal of filth but actually once she had poured enough bleach into it the whole process wasn't that bad and at the end of it she had the satisfaction of a massive clean bin. It took me a lot less time to clean that I thought it would take.
3) You gotta disturb all of the dust and some of it will just settle elsewhere. There's a sort of Cat in the Hat quality to cleaning. When you dust, some of it will just settle elsewhere; when you wipe, you spread the grime into new places. It's impossible to get everything spotless but little by little more ends up in the mop bucket and the vacuum cleaner and you can have the satisfaction of pouring it down the toilet or into the skip.
4) Relatedly, it's better if you open the windows. It makes it more likely that some of the dust will fall outside and it makes you less likely to pass out from the fumes of whatever you're using. There's something else which I can't place my finger on, I guess it's just airing everything out.
5) Spiders. There were a few spiders in the bathroom. The spiders are there presumably because shower rooms attract flies. Spiders eat flies but make webs and spider poo, which is messy. So you have to make a decision, You could get rip of the spiders along with all of the rest of the mess, but then when things get messy again if the flies come back there's nothing left to deal with them. So you have to make a decision, in the long term, am I going to better off with the spiders and the problems they cause or without them. I decided to leave the spiders but clean away the mess they'd made.
So, that's my lessons from Pesach cleaning.