09/14/2026
Y’all, I might be getting a touch cynical, or maybe it’s just what a little crow’s feet does to us all, but I swear I used to see a cleaner world around me.
Parking lots used to be routinely power washed at gas stations. Porter services were employed to pick up public spaces. Restaurants (if we can call heat-and-eats owned by the same massive corporations, serving a “won’t-kill-us-eating-it-once” mentality, restaurants) didn’t have three inches of dust ready to drop an avalanche of dirt, fuzz, skin cells, grease, and gosh knows what else onto us as we walked by.
I mean, can we be so honest?
When did the middle-class hangouts begin looking like this?
Are we all so scrambled that we can’t pause to clean surfaces like we used to?
After COVID, I was glad that so many public schools, private schools, restaurants, and other public buildings seemed to invest in routine cleaning and disinfection. Where did all of that go?
Did we throw the baby out with the bathwater?
I think there are a lot of reasons we’ve lost the art of cleaning as a society recently.
Frankly, I think we are all too rushed.
And that isn’t me saying that we — read: you — are intentionally shunning slow practices. We are living in a coursing river of continuous access.
We are absurdly accessible.
We are being waterboarded by short-form video.
News isn’t contained to four channels anymore. It’s a constant livestream of doomsday and us-versus-them, and somewhere in the middle of all that...
dust settles.
It seems ridiculous to even talk about dust when your nervous system is ready for the next battle. So we rush to the next fire.
I propose we look to cleaning, and other mundane moments, as part of the antidote.
I heard somewhere, some time ago: Ask yourself, “How do I do the dishes?” and that will tell you about your life.
But how can we keep up with it all? Is that even a realistic ask?
I don’t think it is.
We can’t control how infrequently the elementary school disinfects the desks or washes the rugs. We can’t control the restaurant, the gas station, the grocery store, the parking lot, or the thousand other spaces we move through every week.
I suggest we control what is actually ours to impact.
Our own homes.
It starts there.
We raise the standard of care. We wash our hands when we come home. We keep our homes managed and quiet. We wash the sheets, clean the floors, scrub the bathrooms, wipe the surfaces and periodically get into the places where the dust has been quietly settling while we’ve been busy living.
There’s no measure of perfect here, but we can find a level of peace.
A calmer space gives us somewhere to come down from all that noise. Somewhere our bodies can settle, our minds can quiet, and we can become a little steadier before walking back out into all the bustle again.
We may not be able to clean up the whole world.
But we can care for our little piece of it.
🌙