Tag: Martha Stewart

How many times
can you fall off
the planet before
you start to think,
hmmm, maybe I
need better
gravity boots.

My strange week began with me frenetically organizing and cleaning my house.

At first, I thought it was simply having finally read Marie Kondo’s book, the life-changing magic of tidying up: the Japanese art of decluttering and tidying. Though commonsense, it’s all been said and done, in various ways. It’s easy to declutter, you have less stuff that’s more organized. I should write a book. My house looks like a poor woman’s Martha Stewart, with fewer prison ponchos (it’s a good thing).

Then came the gut punch, the calendar explained my sudden need to keep busy – a year ago my 30 year friendship stopped, just as my best friend’s heart had stopped https://yadadarcyyada.com/2015/02/06/goodbye-dearest-friend/ I wanted to do anything but think about my losses, all of them, before and after this one. I wanted to drown my sorrows in the bottom of a neatly folded and lined-up sock drawer. To gamble I could keep the traveling elastic bands and pens all in one place, just one more time.

Even after everything was organized, sorted, recycled, and donated, my feelings of pain, loss, and fear still cluttered my house, heart, and mind. So I purged some of those feelings blocking me from respecting joy, hope, and love. I folded my memories into my life; if I keep hanging them, they’ll take up too much space in my emotional closet.

We’re told we need to be smart, work smart, have smart things, but where is smart really getting us?

• For example, if credit cards are so smart, why can’t they pay off their outstanding balances, huh?

• If TVs are so smart, why do we have to spend so much time looking for something good to watch?

• Maybe we need smart pets that feed, groom, and even walk themselves.

• I have a feeling if I got a smart fridge, I’d hear things like: “Are you here again, girl, get yourself a life!” or “What are you doing, Donna, this is highly irregular!”

• Why stop there? Smart coffee machines, ha, amateurs, how about smart coffee that changes itself from espresso to latte to whatever passes as coffee, depending on your mood.

• Someday your smart car will hold you in contempt without a valid high IQ score.

  

• Smart wine that critiques itself so you can sound like a wine connoisseur, although then everyone will sound the same, so it will be just the wine talking.

• Smart couches that tell us the best spot to park our caboose.

  

War, depression, corruption, terrorism, anxiety, climate change, poverty, prejudice, ignorance, disease, political games, scams, abuse, addiction, melodrama, not to mention simultaneous epidemics of starvation and obesity – we don’t need a zombie apocalypse, we’re doing just fine on our own.

We self-scan, aka us working for a store for free, while putting others out of work (and already over-paying), all the while supporting companies that destroy the environment, while using what amounts to slave labour. Really?

And our complaints are many: my laptop is too heavy, there’s too much food in my house, my smartphone isn’t the latest model, my smartphone doesn’t have a long enough battery life, there’s too many movies/TV shows to stream/watch. I clearly have the wrong definition of ‘smart’.

So I will try to be smarter.

I will thank my body for it’s hard work, especially my heart which has taken a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.

I will commune with my mind, who has respectfully stayed with me through thick and thin.

Everything in its place and a place for everything…as long as it sparks joy.

Happy Valentine’s Day…Who loves ya, baby?