How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Accept the Mess

I used to worry about everything. Honestly. Everything.

I am the sort of person who can see the speck of dust in the cleanest room. Who can look out at a beautiful landscape and notice the rotting tree. Who can be laying in bed with a remote in hand and snacks at the bedside and be worried about tomorrow’s work meeting. In short, I am an attorney.

I find liability traps in all things.

This is not to say I do not take risks nor to say that I do not live amongst the dust. Having 3 dogs I have come to expect a level of imperfection in my home that inwardly could easily drive me absolutely insane were it not for a good cause. I could spend 17 hours wiping every surface and within 2 seconds tiny white hairs would fill the room like marshmallow in a s’more.

Life is messy.

Politics are messy.

Human relationships are messy.

And there are so many videos, books, short pithy blog articles, and inspirational TikTok’s out there who are begging us to crawl out of our gross imperfections and rise to a level beyond imagination, to ascend to a state of frozen perfection where we wash every surface nightly and again on Sundays and everything is organized and clean and often blindingly white.

It all sounds lovely. But my DNA test showed despite my skin color I am not entirely white. And though I am married to a man I am not entirely straight. And although I spend money hiring cleaners and wipe, wipe, wash and pick up daily, I am not entirely clean. And though I am constantly working at it I have never yet been entirely organized.

In college a good friend of mine and I used to sit in diners drinking copious amounts of coffee and talking about what it would take to get our lives together. When we reached that apex we were going to have a “life together party.” It is now 30 years later, we are still friends, and this party has never happened. We’ve been married, had or loved children, had careers and left careers and started new careers, moved houses, challenged assumptions, dealt with aging parents (or in my case their loss), had dalliances and countless beauty products delivered and surgeries and procedures and appointments and disappointments.

And yet.

We never got our lives together. And I think we both understand we never will. We as humans are always in stasis, always moving toward decay or growth but never actually getting to either until that great and terrible day when decay gets us once and for all. My spiritual practice tells me even THAT isn’t the end of all this constant movement and change. We are, as humans, built for rebuilding. Structured for restructuring. We’re never done.

So it’s okay if our houses are a little messy, our bodies a little wrinkled or banged up, our souls a bit crusty with a cynical edge. It’s fine.

Stop worrying.

Because in the end we are constantly at war with nothing and everything but also simultaneously always winning and losing at the same time.

Might as well just ride the wave of that and reach for the shore.