Grief-busy

"There’s not much emotional weight to wiping down a stainless steel dishwasher panel; no one’s going to fall apart if you don’t do it exactly right."

You have no control over big things in your life, so you find satisfaction, if extremely fleeting, in small things that need your attention.

Photo by Jan Kopřiva on Unsplash

Wiping down the counter behind the microwave. Pairing socks. Sorting bras. Trimming the stems of the peonies so they last a little longer. Bagging donations for HousingWorks. Changing the sheets. Changing the sheets again, because wow, high of 80 today? Vacuuming the top of the baseboard behind the dresser. Straightening the kids’ artwork on the wall. Wiping down the tubes and jars and bottles that overwhelm the bathroom. Wiping down the spice jars in the kitchen before realizing half of them expired in 2017.

Tossing half the spice jars.

Does this table need a plant? What if I kept my bracelets in a basket instead of a bowl? Can I find a backing to match all these earrings?

Open Facebook. Close Facebook. Open Instagram. Close Instagram.

Let’s cut up that melon. Let’s label the cereal containers. Let’s make cold brew. Let’s use filtered water and see if we can make extra-clear ice cubes like some #lifehack TikToker stretching for content.

“I organized the water bottle drawer today!” I said into the phone with great pride. I still feel like a fucking idiot for it.

The big things—the family stuff, the financial stuff, the work stuff, the life plans—those of course find their way into each day’s plans, but collectively it feels like that joke about spaghetti growing as you eat it; the bigger bites you take, the more there still seems to be on your plate.

So you return to the small things over and over. Those are simple. Straightforward. You identify the goal and you achieve it and it’s done.

You can point to one minuscule thing in your life that is objectively better because of something you did, and for a very short time, that fills you up.

Fast food for the soul.

Besides, there’s not much emotional weight to wiping down a stainless steel dishwasher panel; no one’s going to fall apart if you don’t do it exactly right.

Eventually, you run out of things to straighten or hang or clean or vacuum or sign or mail or arrange. You run out of forms to sign and piles to tidy and gadgets to charge and the underwear is already folded Marie Kondo style and the spines of all the books on the shelves are already lined up and there’s nothing crunchy at all under your bare feet on the floor, maybe for the longest stretch in history.

That’s when you realize you’re stuck.

You’re stuck alone with your feelings. And those are going to stay messy for a while.

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