I can't help but view the act of sweeping the floor as a metaphor for life.
But then again, what isn't a metaphor for life?
I dance with the dust as I push it across the floor. I move with it in tandem, near it and with it but not too close to it. The dust is delicate and I must be careful not to upset it or it might rush away from where I need it to be. If I push too hard it might flee. If I don’t push hard enough, it might not move from where it currently resides.
What starts as random, scattered chaos slowly becomes organized, collected piles that make sense. Piles that I can control. Piles I understand. Sometimes, the act of dancing with dust that I can see reveals dust that I couldn’t see before, but now becomes clear, because I worked on moving it without even knowing it was there.
Didn’t I just do this? Wasn’t all of the chaos collected just a mere moment ago? Wasn’t it organized and neat and complete? I know that it was. I know it wasn’t a dream. I know that the order was real, the chaos was quiet, and things were calm. But here I am, in the chaos once again. Dancing with it, moving it towards making sense, knowing it will become chaos once again before I am ready for that chaos to come. Knowing that even though I know more chaos will come I shouldn’t wait for that chaos to take care of this chaos, because there’s a threshold for how much chaos I can endure at once. I’ve learned this through testing. Through trial and error. Through letting chaos build and pushing the limits to see what I can handle. Through failing. By letting the chaos overwhelm me I learned how to handle it, how to control it before it gets out of hand, how to manipulate the dust while it is still able to be manipulated.
Some of it I recognize, for it is chaos of my own creation. I put it there, in one way or another. I may have brushed it off my shirt, and onto the floor, to be dealt with later. Better on the floor than a burden on my shoulders. It adds up, you know, the dust on your shoulder. No matter how small it may seem, the shoulders don’t need the extra weight. They already hold enough. They should be brushed off as often as possible. The floor can handle the burden. The floor is strong. The floor is sturdy. The floor can hold the mess and the chaos until I am ready to collect it and organize it and move it away. That’s one of the good things about a floor. But the shoulders should be clean.
Some of the mess is not my own but I make it my own because it belongs to people who are my own. Their mess is my mess and sometimes, if I have chosen the right people, my mess becomes theirs. I collect it and take care of it for them as I hope they will for me when I don’t have it in me to deal with the mess. They have brushed off their shoulders onto the floor and I will take it from here. Because they are my people, and I can handle their chaos along with my own.
Some of the chaos is a mystery. I know not where it came from or how it arrived here on my floor, for me to deal with. It is unrecognizable dust. It is not dust of my own creation, or of my people’s creation. It is dust from the universe, sent to me as a test, to clean up that which is not a mess of my own or my people’s making. A mess with no purpose. A mess with no origin or explanation. A mess for the sake of mess itself. I used to hate this mess. I used to curse this mess. Now I welcome it. Keep coming, chaos. Keep coming, mess. Keep trying to overwhelm me. Because I will not let you win. I will not be enveloped in the chaos. I will defeat the chaos as many times as I have to. I will sweep the dust from my floor and into a pan and into the trash and take the trash outside to be taken away. I do this knowing that I will have to do it again sooner than I believe is fair. I will do this as many times as I have to, as long as I have to, because I have a floor, and when you have a floor that floor must be swept.
That is what living is.
