It is strange how the world is. It is not what we perceive. Orderly mess looks elegant. Take a deep jungle as an example. And sometimes totally uncleaned stuff looks even clean—take a desert as an illustration. We see something but we feel something very different. This is true of how we have opinions on people too, by the way.
Many things start looking unclean after a first-level clean that were "okayish" before. There can be several examples such as glass bottles, bathroom mirrors, etc. A mirror that has a lot of fine dust looks okay. Now wipe it with a wet cloth and wait until dry. Now the mirror is full of dirt water marks and looks terrible. It was better before, even if you had removed some dirt with the cloth. Now wash the cloth in plain water and try again. Now the mirror has improved, yet it draws attention to the remaining stains.
I have an obsession for a clean and organized environment wherever I am. I never realized that with my laziness, while I kept other things in my bathroom clean, for a while I never paid attention to the floor tiles which gathered several salt water stains over the period. A professional cleaner too was of limited help only. I took it upon me for a couple of days. A focused effort paid off well and the bathroom looked much cleaner.
But then the hard stains that did not come off look more attention-gathering; at least for my eyes. I used one cleaning agent after another, and one brush after another, and one scrubber after another. Every attempt I made brought only a marginal improvement. When I would try harder with an even more labor-oriented process, some sections looked so much better, yet by contrast, others looked even worse. A corner that never caught the eye earlier, for example, calls for more attention now!
I am reminded of a Japanese story that explains what exactly is ‘properly clean.’ At the request of a disciple to understand a concept, his teacher asks him to clean the garden. The garden has trees and fallen autumn leaves. The disciple puts in his best effort to impress the teacher and cleans well. But the teacher points to leaves that had drifted while the disciple cleaned section by section.
As the teacher points each time, the disciple cleans everything spotless eventually after multiple iterations. When he proudly invites the teacher, the teacher comes and says there is still a problem. To the disciple’s dismay, the teacher shakes a few trees to let some dry leaves drop on the ground and announces that now it was clean.
He explains that for something to look good, it does not mean to be spotless. It is about removing the excess clutter, yet retaining the things that naturally belong there. You clean to reveal something, not to leave it devoid of everything.
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