One evening when my daughter was four, we visited a new friend’s house for the first time. The house was an old hippy-built cabin in the Vermont woods, lived in by many people over the years, and our friend had recently moved in and transformed the place. That evening, the cabin was sparkling and magical and exquisite in every detail. But over dinner, he told stories of the renovation and his tales of how he found the place were full of dramatic details.
The stench of the carpets they hauled out. The two hours it took to clean the toilet, just the toilet. The disintegrating dead flies in piles on the windowsills. The “body cheese” scraped off the walls behind the bed. The people who lived here before were slobs who had a bank of belongings along each wall, dishes piled in the bathtub, and also a litter of puppies with all the shit and piss that comes with them still present between the floorboards.
We had a beautiful meal from his elegant, clean kitchen, used the spa-like bathroom, then headed home in the cold winter night. As we were pulling out of the long driveway, my daughter asked from the backseat, with concern in her voice, “Are they coming back?” We said, huh? Coming back? Who’s coming back? And she said, “The slobs, are the slobs coming back?” She was genuinely troubled, frightened by their power, but we couldn’t help laughing. Oh, the terrible scary slobs!!
Clean, good, slobs, bad. A dirty house is everything we need to know about someone. Genuinely bad people live in shit-pile houses — murderers, abusers. If your laundry pile is so large it is blocking the light from the sun, we don’t know what you are truly capable of and it scares us. My daughter picked this up from our many cues that evening, we were having so much fun with the spectacle of it all.
The moral judgment and internal fear we carry around cleanliness makes sense. Sloth and slovenly habits are ancient no-nos, deadly sins, for good reasons — how is a culture supposed to survive if all people did was avoid the work that must be done? Lazy slobs must be judged and shamed, and even cast out — the weak and the lazy are a drain on the resources and must be left behind if the group is to survive. This harsh evolutionary reality is at the root of our disdain for the slobs.
But it’s not so simple. The old testament missed some of the nuance. Speaking as a life-long slob at heart, I can tell you that we may be sitting within our own mess, but it may not be the choice you think it is. It could actually be that we do not see it.
All that gunk and all those piles are effectively invisible to the natural-born slob. The eye may reflect the information into the brain, but the brain has no use for it. Fails to register. Does not compute. The brain is amazing that way. It is processing millions of bits of data every moment, and it is smart enough to filter out everything it does not need. It’s the conservation of energy. Efficiency. Paying attention to useless things is wasteful, dangerous even, and natural-born slobs have excellent brain filters.
You’ve heard the line about a messy desk being a sign of a genius mind. That’s what I’m talking about. The genius mind is genius because it doesn’t waste resources on the mold forest towering out of the coffee mug — it is literally invisible to Einstein, because if his brain created space to see it, there’d be less room for the deeper cognitions of relativity.
I’m an intellectual snob who came to regard my slovenly ways not as a sin but a virtue — proof, in fact, that I had better things to do. That my hours watching dust motes swim through the sunbeam were essential to my superiority. That I wasn’t driven to constantly be moving and wiping and putting away — that the absence of that agitation was a blessing and a gift.
Oh those poor cleaning addicts, so virtuous, following all of the rules, such small little lives they lead. Just like a certain type of cheerleader has always been on my shit list, so have the neat freaks. I try to steer clear, they make me nervous. Whether you are aware of it or not, everyone you know is placed on a clean/tidy spectrum. Their desk at work, the backseat of their car, the number of wrinkles in their clothes, it all adds up and you unconsciously place them in a “that kind of person” category, and you adjust your relationship accordingly.
Where do these habits of housekeeping come from? It’s too easy just to blame your mother. She is, of course, the source of much of it, but I think it’s deeper than that. I think some of these orientations around clutter and mess and chores are deeper compulsions that get carried down in longer wisps of DNA. I think we may be born with an internal orientation and interest in making things tidy, or not. Some of us are born with brain filters calibrated towards other things.
Some of us got the trigger that shoots the dart in our ass that makes us leap into the air every time a pillow is out of place. They can’t be still, they can’t focus on anything else until the dishes are done and the counter is clean. I’ve got to say, I’m thankful that isn’t me. Do I like piles of dirty dishes? Not so much, they actually bother me more than they used to, but I’m very thankful I’m free to do as I please and walk right past them without it affecting my heart rate.
Equanimity. Do compulsive cleaners feel it only if their home is clean? Can they open a crammed refrigerator with sticky condiments glued to the glass shelves, pull out the milk, shut the door, and go on their way? Us slobs can do that, right? We did it just this morning and every morning for the past six months. Really, I think we got the better deal — we have freedom, neat-freaks do not.
To change a habit and a home, to move just a notch towards cleanliness and order, is less about will-power and sense of duty, and more about learning to see. Training both the brain and the mind to observe, to snag a bit of interest as the eye crosses over the ring of mold surrounding the sink drain in the bathroom. To take the image in fully and completely, with interest and curiosity. Getting the hand to move towards the sponge and cleaner is a whole other matter, first, the ring of shiny darkness must be seen.
An excerpt from a book of tips and tricks called Housekeeping For the Natural Born Slob.