It has been far too long since I have reviewed/reflected upon a book. For those of you who haven't come across one of my "Book Reflections" before, it's basically a gonzo book review - I'm ostensibly reviewing the book, but mostly just talking about my own ideas and opinions.
Today I'm talking about A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind, by Shoukei Matsumoto.
This is an "Amazon knows me too well" find. Because I read books about Zen, and books about tidying and decluttering, the Amazon algorithms recommended a book about cleaning written by a Zen monk. This is, by the way, why I'm happy with this Faustian deal I've got going with Amazon - yes, they are the devil and they know too much about me and my reading habits... but dang that's come in handy.
Matsumoto's book is not technically about decluttering, but if you followed the advice in this book you probably wouldn't own a lot of clutter after a while - if for no other reason than the fact that you have to clean it.
If I was going to summarise the book in one sentence, it would be to "clean everything often and well so the dirt doesn't get you down."
Like many of the other self-help books I read for fun (and for which I am very bad at taking the advice contained therein), I found the book to be a mixture of "good, practical advice" and "that's totally nuts". It's not as crazy as Kondo's The Life Changing Magic of Tidying (Matsumoto never once suggests storing carrots upright in the fridge), but there is a deep and abiding flaw in the book that he never addresses, and it is impossible to take on his advice properly with this flaw in the way. But I'll come back to that. First, I want to talk about the dirt on my heart.
Matsumoto is constantly talking about how dirt on this or that is dirt on your "heart". How the ink stain on the cuffs of your sleeves is a stain on your heart. How the dust on the floor is dust on your heart. An insufficiently cleaned bathroom reflects on the heart of the person who was supposed to clean it as well as weighing on the mind of everyone who uses it. This is a refrain he comes back to over and over again in the book: we clean to rid the dirt on our hearts and minds.
I was really struggling with this language and definitely leaning towards the "you're a little bit insane" interpretation of his book, before I suddenly asked myself what he meant by "heart". I was taking it from a Judeo-Christian, Western view of things were the idea of "dirt on your heart" meant that you were deeply flawed and a terrible person. But then I started to wonder if "heart", in the context of this book, wasn't one's "essential essence" or "soul" (which was a very weird attitude for a Zen monk to have, it must be said), but rather one's sense of happiness and joy.
We sometimes talk about "heart's ease", things that are "good for the heart", or having something "weighing on our hearts". There are things that dampen our spirits and lift our spirits, but have nothing to do with our "Spirit" (capital S). And I think, this is what Matsumoto is getting at when he talks about cleaning our hearts. We are far more intertwined with our environment than we realise (and even if we do realise it, we tend to forget), and seeing jobs of cleaning and maintenance left undone in our world weighs on us in ways we're not always conscious of.
Dust, stains and broken things that need mending get us down. They tickle at the backs of our minds, stopping us from being completely at ease. Taking the time to clean it/fix it lifts our spirits. Taking the time, every day (or at least on regular days), to keep things clean and mended makes as feel generally better about the universe.
This book is a mixture of "how to" advice for cleaning (as gleaned from centuries of monks taking care of their temples and grounds) and philosophy about the relationship between people and their environment and objects. And, yes, you will probably end up owning fewer things and taking better care of them, because it's not really possible to have a giant household full of stuff and keep it all clean and well tended.
And now for the deep, abiding flaw:
Matsumoto is a monk. He's a monk at a Zen temple with other monks where all of the monks clean the temple all day. That's what they do, that's what their day consists of - "service" (i.e., cleaning) and meditation - and there's a bunch of them to do it. They rotate the tasks so the person cleaning the floors on Tuesday might be tending the garden on Wednesday. The advice he gives on cleaning is based in a reality where a) a task is done everyday or at least several times a week, b) the person doing the task has time to do it well, and c) there are enough people around to do the tasks to make sure they are all done every day or at least every other day.
As a single person with a full time job, I look at much of what he says in the book and think "that's not physically possible - I would have to be in two places at once for every single hour of the day to do all of the supposedly 'daily' tasks." I would have to be or have a full-time housekeeper to keep on top of it all - and then I'd probably need a groundskeeper as well. It simply cannot work in a world where you don't have at least one person whose entire job consists of taking care of things.
Now, there are days when I long for that to be my schtick. I could happily play monk for a while and just sweep the floors and clean the kitchen and bathroom all day. Who knows, one day I just might do this. But I'm not financially in a position to do it at the moment. I doubt most people are.
I am probably going to start cleaning more things more often, though. I've already started doing this with my desk at work, and it is definitely calming and relaxing to start the day with clearing away whatever dust might have accumulated in my space.
I was saying to someone recently that I'm thinking of developing a cleaning disorder. Hopefully, if I cultivate it on purpose, I'll be able to put it to good use without becoming too obsessive about it. And even if it does get out of hand, it's better for my health than other "disorders" and I might be able to make a living out of it - hey, it worked for Marie Kondo.
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