The Clean-As-You-Go-Brigade

When I was a kid, I enjoyed biscuit-making. My family loved my Anzacs, but my specialty was my own secret recipe choc-chip cookies. These cookies were so special that one day, for some reason, they made my best mate vomit while running the annual school cross country, resulting in the one year she came in second place instead of first. Except for the year she didn't run at all because she was at home recovering from surgery and someone else had the glory of winning. Oh, that's right. It was me. Huh.

While I was baking these delightful biscuits, my mum would encourage me to take a 'clean-as-you-go' approach, and when I say 'encourage', I mean she would survey the absolute devastation that was her kitchen and suggest it as strongly as she could, without risking losing her Anzac-baking service. If there was a Clean-As-You-Go Brigade, she was the leader.

But I personally preferred the dump-as-you-go-then-clean-up-later approach (or, I would dump as I went and the magic fairy known as Dad would clean up later). Never mind that I ran out of bench space and utensils within seconds and there was golden syrup sticking everything together including a wooden spoon to the inside of the flour container. And let's not talk about ants. (And that time we had to have the house ant-bombed. Because the kitchen was black. With ants.)

Nowadays, my dump-as-you-go approach is starting to become slightly more problematic. I have a one-year-old whose life's purpose is to empty all cupboards, drawers and shelves, and if I don't do any tidying by 7pm you can barely see carpet. I sink down on the couch and find blocks up my butt. I go into the kitchen and - woo! -  it's slip 'n' slide time on Tupperware! My clothes are behind the toilet. It's the second law of thermodynamics in my face every day and I'm getting more and more sick of the massive clean-up that happens at the end of it. 

So in recent times, I've begun thinking that maybe there was something in this 'clean-as-you-go' business mum was on about. If you don't continually tidy here and there, you live in a world of extremes, where you're either on the way up, or on the way down. You're either cleaning up the kitchen or dirtying it. Never just...using it.
And it seems that it applies beyond the kitchen; human relationships are these dynamic, constantly evolving entities that never reach some state of tidy perfection you can stand back and passively admire. As hard as it is, and as much as I often don't keep working, keep tabs on what's happening around me and keep up with it, it's better than slip 'n' slide, bruise-your-coccyx-in-the-kitchen, and better than a cycle of letting relationships slide until you suddenly realise they're in disrepair, then talking/promising/working them out all better again. Even then, when you sporadically clean up a place so good you can see your reflection in it, it's only going to be great for the five seconds or so until you have to actually go on living in it.

Perhaps a world of extremes is more thrilling - not to mention easier - for a while, until you realise there's a whole world of better ways to expend your emotional energies than on drama. I'm thinking perhaps it's time to seriously think about switching over to the Clean-As-You-Go Brigade, because sometimes you can enjoy Anzacs a whole lot more when you can eat them in a nice, clean kitchen with no ants.