I have had a revelation, y’all. You know how sometimes in life you can grasp the concept that you need to do better in certain areas, and you feel a small twinge of guilt or shame about where you are, but you can’t seem to bridge that gap between knowing better and doing better? Then suddenly, the lightbulb goes off in your head. It’s like a switch flips and you go from wanting to change to having this internal drive that makes you change. Well, my light has gone off.

Pretty much all my life I have been this absent minded junky person. I literally don’t care about cleaning and taking care of things. Or I didn’t at least. Recently, something has happened. Something has changed.

I got a new pair of silky pink shoes the other day and I accidentally spilled coffee on them on Sunday. Any other day of my life I would have carried on like nothing happened. But that day, I cleaned them. On Monday when I pulled into the parking lot at work, my key wouldn’t come out of the ignition and my car wouldn’t turn off. My boss and the other ladies on my team met me in the parking lot and we eventually got it out. The whole time I was thinking, man I wish my car was clean right now. Suddenly, every speck of dirt, every ding, every crumb screamed at me. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the chalky residue on my door left from me trying to spit out Listerine and missing the concrete. All things I would normally overlook.

Later that day, out of the blue something told me to get up and clean my desk. I couldn’t sit in my chair any longer with this mountain of boxes and tile samples all over the place from last week’s project. I even labeled my bottle of super glue with my initials. I couldn’t help it. And when I walked out to leave, something inside of me said, “I want to start taking care of my stuff.”

I started thinking about all of the things I had let slide and decided that I want to be a good steward. I have been blessed with so much, and the way I have a habit of letting things go bad has suddenly become distasteful to me. I’m definitely not Type A, nor will I ever be, nor am I a perfectionist. I do, however, finally realize how important it is to take care of the things I’ve been blessed with. Isn’t that what real gratitude is? Demonstrating that you are grateful?

Is this maturity? Or spring cleaning?

Xoxo Kaisha