Upkeep

It has become almost an ordeal for me to keep the home neat and tidy. I seem to diligently scrub, mop, clean and wash all day only to find more scrubbing, mopping, cleaning and washing waiting to be done. The car gets dirty, the carpet loses its spring, the television screen attracts little specks of dust and the the stainless steel kitchen sink becomes dull and jaded by the end of the day form all the soap scum. I seem to vacuum and scrub, vacuum and scrub, vacuum and scrub ( not in that particular order) whole day and get sick and tired of it.
The upkeep applies to everything. My hair that shines and bounces the day it is washed gets slick with all the overactive oil glands in my scalp the day after it is washed. My skin gets all shiny, flushed and red by the end of the day and the tummy growls of hunger from time to time indicating the want of fuel to keep the body machine going.
Relationships require upkeep as well. I stay in touch with the people I wish to stay in touch with and lose touch with the people I wish to lose touch with. Or it is more like if I maintain the chain of communication the relationship exists - otherwise it vanishes.
So, Maintenance is more of an appropriate word. I cuss about the cleaning ever day and being the order obsessed Virgo I am, I succumb to the pressure of keeping the house clean. Aarti contributes to my nerve grinding by scattering her toys through the length and the breadth of the house, leaving melted ice cream spots on the floor and getting her moonsand into the carpet an area rugs. I am not even mentioning the laundry that gets piled up everyday.
So I just wanted to give maintenance a philosophical twist. What if we let the debris of ill thoughts pile up in our mind? What if we do not give much importance to cleansing our insides that produce toxins of feelings day in and day out? Does our mind require as much upkeep as our bodies and homes demand? Or is it just convenient to mask our mental ugliness with the likes of hypocrisy and false virtues? May be it is. That is probably the reason why we see so much of hate, hard feelings, jealousy, selfishness, vanity and harshness around us. We perhaps spend more time looking without and maintaining the external things that exhibit themselves as a reflection of ours and the soul that actually matters gets tarnished in the heap of filth accumulated form non-maintenance. How wonderful it would be , if we could just take our souls out and rinse them under the tap like those cylinders that come in the home air purifiers? Would all the scum run in water and leave us with crystal clear souls?

I think it is possible. It just requires practice. All we need to do is weed all the bad stuff out and keep our souls clean. Would the world not a wonderful, clean place that way?