Minimalism, laziness and calm

My attention was arrested by a minimalist YouTuber saying something along these lines:

"At the moment I have small children so it's very important to keep our home very functional and clutter-free. Later, when my children have grown up, I will have more time and more energy, so that might not be as important."

Haha. Hahaha. You think?

My mother was a very vigorous and industrious woman. She also had crazy hormone imbalances, life-long suicidal depression, and came of a family impressively endowed with psychiatric illness. But her physical toughness and sheer moral determination kept everything in order. Every morning, beds made (yes, with neat hospital corners), bathrooms cleaned, whole house vacuumed and dusted throughout, all meals and snacks made at home from first principles. All the (numerous, indoors and out) pots of flowers watered morning and evening, garden beds weeded, greenhouse watered and aired, hens and sheep fed and checked and dosed if necessary, dog walked. Every day. In the evening, knitting or sewing and methodically blanching and bagging garden vegetables for the freezer, stewing the apples (also for the freezer, ironing, walking the dog again after the evening meal had been cooked, eaten, and everything washed up and dried up and tidied away. My mother had no hobbies, ever — she didn't need any.

I am very different. Yes, in my childhood I was roped in for chores — feeding the hens, walking the dog, picking the gooseberries, watering the tomatoes, peeling the potatoes, even (along with my sister) concreting the barn floor.

But, as we had very little money and never went anywhere and my mother was always busy, I had plenty of time left over for communing with trees, watching garden insects about their busy lives, drawing and singing and listening to music and wandering along to the church for Evensong, and making up stories in my head. Nobody in our house had a very high opinion of school, so any homework I did was late night and last minute. 

When I grew up and left home, I worked for monks and nuns for a while, then lived in community, then got married and lived in the ground floor of an old rectory in York. Washing up was tedious so I and my young husband didn't do it (we borrowed a trestle table from church to accommodate the mountain of dirty crockery) and cleaning the house never occurred to us.

Later, with young children, everything we had was strewn around on the floor, dogs and hens wandering through — goats too, sometimes — and we washed up the dirty crocks when we'd run out of things to eat off.

Fortunately, since my encounter with Francis of Assisi when I was fifteen, we lived simply if casually, and never owned very much. Our nearest approximation to clutter was children's toys (and they didn't have all that many) and numerous musical instruments (my husband was a multi-musician and music teacher); everything from the normal things like recorders and guitars and a piano, through to euphoniums and African drums, a bugle and a harp and a sitar. My children are the same now. One of them even has a hurdy-gurdy (and a second one on order).

We had loads of books, of course — to our mind, that's what the alcoves either side of the chimney breast are for, bookshelves.

So our home was untidy, and fairly dirty, but not cluttered. I mean, we washed our clothes and kept the bathroom clean, but did not keep house with the focus and rigour my mother brought to the task.

I like my house and family to be calm, and peaceful. I guess my priority is the things of the mind and soul. I have little enthusiasm for housework. I do believe in cleanliness, though, and in good food cooked from first principles as the foundation for health. I open the doors and the windows to let in the fresh air and the light. I am also hyper-mobile, so I tire easily — standing up is quite hard for me; I'm okay if I'm walking, or sitting/lying down, but standing up (standing still) makes me feel ill. And sport? Hahaha — no. I have not a competitive bone in my body, my joints are as soft as butter, my cardio-vascular system gives up at the slightest hurdle, and rules have always failed to fix my attention.

Now, in old age, far from (as that minimalistic YouTuber imagined) having more time and energy, I have time (yes) but such energy as I ever had has evaporated like a volatile chemical in an unsuccessful experiment.

But (you must surely have noticed this yourself), there is this thing about old people's houses. The lampshades are always cruddy with accumulated dust. The grout in the bathroom tiles is always infested with beige mould. The kitchen surfaces are festooned with grease that clingeth tighter than a brother. Blissfully unaware of all this because they haven't put their glasses on, old people potter about in their comfortable nest of a lifetime's clutter, breaking a femur when they trip over the vacuum cleaner lying in the passage.

This is not what I want for myself.

But I am, and always have been, lazy. I don't mean morally lazy, it's just that my body doesn't want to do much (and never has). An Alexander teacher who once tried to organise me had to concede I had the laziest back she'd ever seen. Also I don't know where I am on the autistic spectrum or if I qualify as a Highly Sensitive Person, and I don't much care, but I am off the chart on the Seriously Odd spectrum. 

You see what I mean?

My days drift aimlessly in the realm of weird, my friends have all died or got bored of me, and I have no wish to accumulate the paraphernalia associated with hobbies. My lifelong rule has been, and still is, to carry my occupation inside my head so it needs only the most minimal toolkit; once a lined A4 pad and a biro, now a laptop (the smallest and lightest available). I have no desk, no study, no office chair, no (physical) files. 

And I keep my house and my soul calm and clean and airy by having very little to curate in the first place.

There is, nowadays (it was not always so by any means) so little in my schedule that I can keep things orderly — throwing things away, and labelling the jars so I know one lot of white powder from another.

I have few enough things standing about that it is easy to wipe down the surfaces. 

My soul still yearns wistfully for the one-bag variety of minimalism, but I get cold in the winter so I have a small collection of thick sweaters plus a wooly hat plus wooly socks plus a fleece gilet (two, actually) plus a heated blanket, and these are very greedy for space. One bag? Maybe, but it would be a hell of a bag. I'll show you one day, what I have.