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Clean is something that I have a hard time with.

I don't wash my hair every day. My clothes are generally stored in less than tidy ways, and my inbox has thousands of unread mail I'll never go through and delete at this point.  I like a kid with dirt and messy hair. And sometimes super clean big houses make me feel claustrophobic.

I understand that a thing being clean or messy, organized or less than that, is not in itself good or bad. It is all in how we choose to see it, how it makes us feel, what judgement we pass upon it being what it is.

But lately I've been having a hard time knowing quite how to feel about it, and in general feeling more like the way my house most often is (messy) is not how I'd like it to be.

We live in a small, two bedroom house built post WW2. Wooden floors, very limited closet space and piles of instrument cases in one corner, bursting bookshelves against the wall. I love it, to be honest.

It's just all the stuff. I try to sort, make runs to Savers and the DI almost every other week. But still. It seems as though stuff is reproducing itself just to mock me. Piles, toys, objects that don't really have a place to go but may be useful at some future unknown point in time. Sentimental things. What do we do with these things? How did they get here?

Maybe it's living with a two year old.

I just want my home to be peaceful and warm, uncluttered and simple. To be a place I don't feel incredibly embarrassed or sorry if people show up unannounced. Or open any of the drawers.

So I'm trying. Moving towards not worrying about what visitors may think of me or the place I live, and towards finding ways that work. Towards seeing cleanliness not as a daily battle, but something I'm choosing to do because I like creating.

And here's my current favorite cleaning music, if you want to get pumped and feel powerful an all that, even if it's just so you can clean off your desk one more time.