The urban legend says that the Spanish, thanks to the muslim heritage, we are a country with high cleanliness standards. Out there in Europe and the United States, the staff is not all day cleaning cloth and broom in hand sweeping their little house. It is true that our obsession with neatness is a source of intense conflict between parents and teenage children and let alone between couples. And it is that everyone has a threshold of crap as they have a threshold of pain. It’s something personal.
It is grime threshold on the other hand, it adds to our tolerance for accumulation, that is, for junk. We are a baroque country. The Spanish home, large or small, has to be filled with furniture and archipelago to its maximum capacity and the fashion of minimalism could only be implemented here because there are storage rooms. I see those white houses from the magazines with nothing on the sideboards and I pity the owners. What do they do with the chirimbolos that they give them? I do not believe that as that mother or that mother-in-law arrives with a ceramic vase they will send her to the clean point. Minimalism for a Spanish family requires convictions and determination that we lack. Minimalism is for more austere and more spiritual peoples. We are carnal and material and we variegate the spaces. If between the dining room and the sofa you have to go on edge, all the better. It’s the style we like.
This fondness of ours for hygiene in crowded houses during the pandemic has been one more ordeal. Because Having a rococo palace tidy is not the same as mocking a loft. And it is that, among many lessons, the pandemic has shown us the difference between clean and dirty. We have never seen so much cloth and so much bleach. Our sink is so shiny we could eat in it, just like in the old advertisement. I have faded bottom pants as I sat in a chair so neat it was a puddle of bleach. In these two years, from the most shabby to the most neat, we have wished to see the doorknobs and handles of the doors, whether in the subway, in the office or in the home elevator, shiny as mirrors. Our clothes never saw so much soap. Especially in the first confinement, when we did not know how the virus was transmitted, We would return from the supermarket and leave shoes and clothes on the landing to head into the shower and rub ourselves with the intensity of Meryl Streep and ‘Silkwood’, that lovely movie about a union leader at a nuclear fuel plant.
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During these almost two years of keeping the house, the office, the bar like a whistle we have discovered (apart from some belongings that we thought were lost and that were fallen behind the table and apart from the original tone of the bathroom tile in the cafeteria where we had breakfast that it was not gray, but white) that dusting is grounding, that scrubbing is a cheap way to practice the here and now that psychologists recommend, and that rubbing faucets is a form of active meditation. Responsibility, humility, dignity, modesty, humility all these virtues come to mind as I pass the vacuum cleaner and I notice that it is time to change the bag and I have not bought a replacement. Not in vain the cleaning of one’s own cell is part of the rule of many religious orders; cleaning the temple is the first Buddhist movement towards mental balance; and African women meticulously sweep their homes every morning for the sake of ancestor spirits, so that they can rest in harmony and protect their relatives. From the Bauhaus to the Tao passing through Islam, there are numerous cultural movements that include cleaning as part of their rites and their philosophy. And it is that cleaning invites you to faith and awareness. If you clean, next time you will think twice about making a mess. If you clean, it means that you trust the future and want to make room for it. You just have to think about what happens to us when we are depressed and hopeless, going through the shower and cleaning the room is the last thing we want.
I liked that we have become even cleaner during the pandemic, because we have done it by giving it its time and its purpose. Keeping the house clean has no longer been a whim of heavy mothers and we have incorporated the ritual. It is not a bad thing to finally take charge of the dusty mark we leave on the world. Soaping our hands and how much we touch is a way of conjugating the plural: in front of the “yo & rdquor; that “we & rdquor; often invisible that is sorely lacking.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com