This Is Why Clarity Is Something We Can Cultivate

I’ve been tidying up quite a lot recently, and not only my mind.

Image by Peter H

The other day I heard most of us don’t clean our mattresses. I mean, how do you even do that? That was the point the vacuum cleaner expert (yes, they exist) was making: we simply don’t know how to cleanse the part of our home on which we spend most of our day. Notice how I struggled to find the term for the domain a mattress belongs to. Is it furniture? Surely not an appliance? All dictionaries seem to converge on calling it a “pad”. Great, thanks. If we don’t even know what a mattress is how could we know we are to clean it?

The cameras in our phones haven’t made most of us photographers. Similarly, the presence of a vacuum cleaner as part of our household appliances doesn’t make us professional cleaners either. Have you ever placed a torch on the floor while you’re hoovering? Don’t. If you do, I guarantee you’ll be shocked at how little cleaning and how much scattering we do. Even on a seemingly immaculate home, chances are we don’t even go anywhere near our mattress. Dead skin, dust and bugs, loads of bugs, dead and alive, come to rest inside the fibres that comprise the structure we lie on every night. Yuck.

As a result, disposing of an old mattress is harder than bringing a new one to the home: old…