The sunlight pours in through my freshly cleaned windows… yes, I am showing off!! It happens so rarely that I need to boast about it. I worked hard on them yesterday and I need to revel in the fact that I won’t need to do it again for a long time! I need to bask (just this once) in the knowledge that my windows are cleaner than yours! Aside from the fact that the bright sunshine now shows up smears on the windows that I missed yesterday, I am happy! I can see through the windows now, instead of having my attention always arrested by the ugly spatters of dust, mud and other unidentified flying objects that have appeared on them over time (quite a lot of time). Living in a busy city with a major building project just down the road is a recipe for disaster. All day long the diggers and trucks come and go, churning up the mud and spraying grit and sand as they go. Living in a country that is built on sand makes for an awful lot of dust.
The sunshine shows up the dust that has dared to return to the polished surfaces I cleaned yesterday (yes, I’m boasting again!). Actually I hate cleaning. Like many people, I find it mind-numbingly boring, infinitely tedious, and everything in me rebels against the sheer pointlessness of doing something so time-consuming and unfulfilling when, in just a couple of days, it will have returned to its natural state, despite all my best efforts. So my only reward is the warm glow that I get from the sense of achievement (short-lived, it’s true, but good at the time) and the chance to boast.
Already today, the sunshine is showing up the places where, in one day alone, dust has gathered once again, just fallen out of the atmosphere onto our poor old house that we paint and patch up, propping it up with endless renovations so that it will keep on going for another few decades. I can see the motes of dust now, suspended in the shafts of sunshine. There they hang, taunting me with their invincibility and their never-to-be-conquered presence. Some lucky mortals actually revel in these futile domestic tasks, enjoying their skirmishes with the enemy, crowing over their achievements: their temporary triumph over the army of dust mites, oblivious to the steady, ongoing decay of their environment. For decaying it is. From ‘dust to dust’ and from ‘ashes to ashes’ we go and we can do little to stop the rot, no matter how hard we try.
In the church-going days of my youth I understood that this miserable process was all, in some mysterious way, part of ‘The Fall’ – a choice that was made one fateful day in history that set us on our way towards sin and sickness, death and decay - and dust! Modern technology seems to have done little to rescue us from the last of these ills, as well as from life’s ultimate conclusion. Apparently, just to add insult to injury, a large number of these annoying grains of dust are made up of my own (and your) decaying body cells! We ourselves help to make up the wretched dust that surrounds us and are daily cleaning up the consequences of our own mortality! There’s food for thought on a sunny day!
It’s time to go out to play! Enough of these morbid thoughts! I will leave my decaying house behind, in the knowledge that, for better or worse, my chores are done. With a clear conscience and lightness of heart, I can take my decaying body on a well-earned jaunt, going in search of warm sunshine and more pleasurable pursuits!
The sunshine shows up the dust that has dared to return to the polished surfaces I cleaned yesterday (yes, I’m boasting again!). Actually I hate cleaning. Like many people, I find it mind-numbingly boring, infinitely tedious, and everything in me rebels against the sheer pointlessness of doing something so time-consuming and unfulfilling when, in just a couple of days, it will have returned to its natural state, despite all my best efforts. So my only reward is the warm glow that I get from the sense of achievement (short-lived, it’s true, but good at the time) and the chance to boast.
Already today, the sunshine is showing up the places where, in one day alone, dust has gathered once again, just fallen out of the atmosphere onto our poor old house that we paint and patch up, propping it up with endless renovations so that it will keep on going for another few decades. I can see the motes of dust now, suspended in the shafts of sunshine. There they hang, taunting me with their invincibility and their never-to-be-conquered presence. Some lucky mortals actually revel in these futile domestic tasks, enjoying their skirmishes with the enemy, crowing over their achievements: their temporary triumph over the army of dust mites, oblivious to the steady, ongoing decay of their environment. For decaying it is. From ‘dust to dust’ and from ‘ashes to ashes’ we go and we can do little to stop the rot, no matter how hard we try.
In the church-going days of my youth I understood that this miserable process was all, in some mysterious way, part of ‘The Fall’ – a choice that was made one fateful day in history that set us on our way towards sin and sickness, death and decay - and dust! Modern technology seems to have done little to rescue us from the last of these ills, as well as from life’s ultimate conclusion. Apparently, just to add insult to injury, a large number of these annoying grains of dust are made up of my own (and your) decaying body cells! We ourselves help to make up the wretched dust that surrounds us and are daily cleaning up the consequences of our own mortality! There’s food for thought on a sunny day!
It’s time to go out to play! Enough of these morbid thoughts! I will leave my decaying house behind, in the knowledge that, for better or worse, my chores are done. With a clear conscience and lightness of heart, I can take my decaying body on a well-earned jaunt, going in search of warm sunshine and more pleasurable pursuits!
No comments:
Post a Comment