Reaching out to the corners

How often do you use a cloth to clean the floors of your home?

Sounds as a weird question? Quite understandable!

In this age of maids, mopping sticks and mopping robots, taking a wet cloth and cleaning by hand could sound weird to many. Probably, there is a generation of kids who don't even know that in olden days this is how people used to clean their homes. But I would strongly suggest that you try doing this at least once. But why?

Because:

You discover a lot of things that you were thinking are lost. 

As you need to bend down to mop, you discover that there are many tiny things like pens, some papers (bills may be) etc hiding under the furnitures or the corners.

You discover a lot of unreached corners in your home. 

You would be surprised to see the amount of dust gathered under your bed or sofa.

You realize that you are not doing justice to your home maintenance under the pretext of a busy schedule.

Why don't people do deep cleaning consistently?

Willingness

Many people staying in rented homes or apartments are not willing to spend time and energy in the home maintenance. They don' t have a sense of responsibility for the home and hence are ready to live among the dirt. Anyways, the home would be painted once in 4 or 5 years and all the dust would be removed at that time. Why waste time everyday on this?

Motivation

Even if you are living in your own home, how often do you feel its worth the time to do deep cleaning of your homes? As cleaning is a repetitive activity, its considered as unproductive. At this point, I am reminded of my grandma's words, "The more you keep your homes clean, the more would the goddess of wealth be happy to stay in your home" and I strongly believe in her words. And sometimes, have felt it to be true.

Cleaning, though repetitive, is not unproductive, Everytime you do it, you learn a way to do it more efficiently. Also, you start thinking twice or thrice before buying any thing, which could occupy space or which could block the corners. If you do the deep cleaning consistently, the time that you would require to spend on cleaning would be drastically reduced in due course.

In a way, you learn to remove the wastes or waste generating objects (Reminded of the 'lean' concept?).

Support 

Its an agreed fact, that more the number of people who are committed and could contribute to an objective, the more faster and more efficient would be the way in which the objective would be achieved. If everyone in the family could support, then I am sure such homes would definitely be beautifully maintained.

Ok. Now why am I writing about this? Am I interested in seeing your homes beautiful? May be.

But more importantly, this act of cleaning by reaching out to the corners, would help you learn how to develop the willingness to do a seemingly monotonous activity, be self motivated and also to learn to gather support, which are very important lessons in leadership.

Ours is a culture which brings out leadership in us so naturally. Lets not lose it!

What I learnt while gardening

I am sure everybody will agree that maintaining a garden is a beautiful and fulfilling art.

Seeing a seed, laid by you, grow into a plant and yield fruits gives so much happiness and satisfaction (more than how a parent would feel seeing their kids grow and be on their own in life). A beautiful garden is not just one plant or tree. Its a collection of a variety of plants and maintaining them requires that you spend time with them consistently.

Not every seed that you lay grows into a plant or tree!

When you have access to a piece of land to make it a garden, you would try to find out all different plants or trees (flower yielding, fruit yielding, vegetable yielding or medicinal plants or some crotons). Its always a good idea to have a variety of plants grown in the garden, as you never know which would yield more or which will never yield. So even if one choice of plant does not work out, still there are many others that would give you yield and happiness. Also, we need to make sure that the different varieties of plants would be able to peacefully grow with each other.

Not every new sapling that shows its head out in your garden is planted by you! 

Many a times our gardens could surprise us.  After a heavy rain, you could see that there are lot of new mushrooming plants, some of them you may not even know how to call it. 

Not every sapling not planted by you is a weed!

Thanks to technology, you  take a picture of it and search in google and would be surprised to see that few of them are medicinal herbs and few of them are vegetable yielding plants that have grown from the kitchen wastes you have thrown. And you start searching to find out how to arrange them so that they all grow without occupying your walkway and also without obstructing each other's growth.

Walking down my own garden, the above thoughts crossed my mind. Suddenly it struck to me that your garden can be compared to your life and the plants in your life are the skills you learn or acquire. 

Not every skill you have, is learnt by you.

Not every skill you have learnt, helps you.

And you are not aware of all the skills you have (Many a times, we are like Lord Hanuman. Some one needs to remind us that we have so and so skill).

We need to identify and develop skills in such a way that we would be able to devote enough time in nourishing each of them. All the skills may or may not be useful to us. So, identifying the skills we already have and identifying the right skills that could co exist and also would make our life beautiful are arts in themselves.

Grooming a garden is a journey where we are not working towards a single goal. Instead we take it one day at a time and would be happy to do everyday. Similarly, nourishing the skills in our life is also a beautiful journey which when done consistently by devoting sufficient time to it, would be a beautiful journey. And such a journey in itself is a success in life!!

Yes, to live is an art!!