Hello everyone.
“Cleaning and doing laundry is the purification of the soul.”
Back in my student days. Inspired by Takano Etsuko’s book “The Origin of Twenty Years Old,” I also wrote a diary for a time. The above is a sentence I wrote. It’s clumsy, immature, and embarrassing.
But it’s not completely far-fetched.
During that time, I was tormented, not knowing what to do with my overflowing self-consciousness. My life became rough, and my small apartment became a literal garbage dump.
One day, I finally asked “Nandemoya Honpo” to clean out the accumulated garbage.
In the room that had been cleaned for the first time in a long time, I wrote the above sentence.
Whether my purified soul was able to live a healthy life after that will be a topic for a future article, but I can say with confidence that at least for now, my home is clean.
“A room is a barometer of the heart.” It’s a common saying, even without bringing up my own experience. When your mind is healthy, your room will be tidy, and when it is the opposite, your room will be messy. In other words, at this point, I think I can say that my mind is healthy.
So, what about Yumenomori?
Let’s look at it from the perspective of beautifying the surrounding environment, rather than the daily words and actions of the students. To be honest, after school, we sometimes come across scenes that make us frown.
5th period.
All the students at Yumenomori inspect the school. Putting aside the “search for the culprit” of who did it, everyone is looking here and there with wide eyes.
“Oh, it’s dirty here!”
“Hey, who left footprints here?”
Our school is still brand new. But if you look closely, you can see the dirt everywhere.
The lockers in particular are a mixed bag. Some have scraps of paper, stones they’ve picked up, indoor shoes, textbooks, and other things all crammed together in their lockers.
“It’s dirty!” “It’s terrible!” “Who did it?”
After a bit of fuss, we get to the main topic.
The designer speaks to the students.
“How was it? It was pretty dirty, wasn’t it? Whose school is this? It’s everyone’s school, right? Aren’t there more important things than trying to figure out who did it?”
The students all speak up at once.
“Let’s clean it up!”
“Let’s all clean it up together!”
With a unified mind, the “big cleaning” begins.
They take brooms, wipe the whiteboard with water, and scrub off pencil stains with sponges. During normal cleaning time, you often see people playing sword fighting with brooms, but this time everyone is focused on cleaning.
“I’ll do this, so please clean the floor!”
“Oh, I’ll clean this, so bring a bucket and a rag.”
They call out to each other and the cleaning progresses smoothly and smoothly.
It took about an hour.
Thanks to everyone’s cooperation, it was completely cleaned up, even in the smallest details.
Everyone was out of breath, with flushed cheeks and a satisfied look on their face.
Some of them said, “I want to do more,” or “I want to do it again tomorrow.”
After seeing it with their own eyes, using their own hands, and using their legs and back to mop the school, it seems that the school beautification finally became “my responsibility.”
The school building was cleaned once. Next time, I want to use it without getting it dirty.
I can hear such voices here and there.
It seems that everyone realized that it is more important to make efforts to keep the school building clean than to clean it.
After all, “cleaning is a purification of the soul.”
I nod to myself…
As I write this, I suddenly feel anxious.
“The president cleans the company toilets early in the morning.” I sometimes hear such moral stories.
I think it’s a kind of heartfelt tale. I think it’s a wonderful story that embodies the saying, “The more rice ripens, the more it bows its head.” However, I’m a coward and don’t want to praise it without reservation or promote it. This is because I feel that such heartfelt tales are no longer in keeping with the Reiwa era. It seems that the opening phrase, “Cleaning is purifying the soul,” should be kept quietly in my heart as a garden lesson. If I were to chant it out loud, I would be immediately criticized by conscious people as “outdated!” and by lazy people as “so you’re saying our souls are impure!”.
Even if there is trash and you can’t tidy up, it’s fine as long as you can live.
Everyone has their own criteria for judging “clean” and “dirty.” Everyone is different and everyone is good!
…I’ve gone off topic from my beautification activities, but I’ve recently been feeling the irony that in the name of “diversity,” the difficulty of living is increasing.
