IronED!

The way we approach life and cleaning are so very coherent and conjoined. I strongly believe so!

Cleaning and Life can be a dance or an exercise, meditation or drudgery, ritual or a chore. I like to think and rethink what cleaning means and choose a different form of cleaning from time to time

As the days of the week keep ticking down towards the weekend, both life and cleanliness worries me. The things that have been worrying me are those that I don't have any control over, Nevertheless THEY are the ones I WANT control over. This morning I just woke up knowing today was the day for both thinking and reflecting on my way of CLEANING!

A quick look around us shows us that we like to surround ourselves with objects that create a sense of wealth, protection, comfort, and community. Everything needs to be cleaned from time to time. We often clean without FOCUS... That is a problem, because everything we do or every act we perform requires a certain amount of FOCUS. We often don't give it the focus it deserves because we believe this process to be something that steals our time from our already busy schedules!!!

For Me IRONING, Ironing is my act of cleanliness, apart from the many of acts of cleanliness I perform; Ironing is a personal favorite and a really good cleanser. Ironing helps me reconsider my interactions with my possessions, people around me, and the environment.

Thursday evenings or Friday Mornings provide the Ideal Cleaning time for me, to stop and reflect upon the material world, object by object, person by person, thereby reaching a deeper sense of ourselves, or a higher platform... Through this cleaning I am forcefully confronted with the meanings I attach to objects in my lives. I believe our possessions represent our identities and our individual psychologies, together manifesting themselves in how we CLEAN. Everyone cleans with different intention. I clean to distress, decode, interpret concealed messages, and crack the social connectivity norms...

In short I love IRONING...  Ironing the clothes, pressing the creases, smoothening the wrinkles, and getting a crisp and kadak outcome. I take delight in wrinkles — those complexities that shift and fold our thoughts, the crease can be very well compared to those of our face while in concentration or laughter, and can also be directly correlated to the random happenings that shift our daily monotonous life into plots of fiction! The Hot shower vapor not only smoothens and makes us appreciate a crease free dress, but also give encouragement to try and smoothen all the wrinkles and creases in our life!

It takes me almost ten minutes just to get the space arranged and to start my cleansing. Fixing the iron board and iron to the electrical socket, selecting all the clothes required for the coming week, the hangers perfectly aligned, in order and ready to receive the newly ironed clothes, the water spray bottle all filled and then I am SET! The Iron is heated up and there begins my cleaning, moving back and forth over the creases and wrinkles, pressing on uneven planes, smoothening, spraying on water, the sound of the hot vapor rising from the clothes, the smell of fresh laundry... How can someone NOT find this therapeutic! Ironing helps me clean, demarcate and properly allocate my thoughts and feelings that I harbor in myself.

When I finish, I feel a deep sense of stillness inside. All the strong concentration towards smoothing each wrinkle in the fabric one by one creates a different connection, a new association between all those feeling, emotions and not forgetting memories of the past week, deriving new explanations to the same all along!! It's like flattening and crushing the hill and valleys of remembrance into a smooth sinuous flowing fabric of my life. IRONING is Bliss!  Unless of course, you think of Ironing as an irritating chore which can at any moment turn into a burn-inducing catastrophe!!! :P 

*Statuary Warning - This could also lead to burning of that new silk top that you have finally brought after having saved up for it, or having a nice wide hole in that khadi shirt of yours! So BEWARE! ;)