It’s helpful to begin the new year with a clean slate. However in order to do that, it is important to deal with any situations or setups that are connected with or derived from the past. If I don’t clean up what I need to from the past, I will have created a big mess that impedes my progress in the year to come. I learned this the hard way one year when I accumulated a huge pile of items that needed to be filed because I had never found the time to do it conveniently. Thus I had an inconvenient task to deal with. This year I have been dilatory about filing new poems where they were meant to go. When I have done this a little at a time organizing them is much easier.

          The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah begins with a thorough cleansing and refurbishing of the entire home, most especially the kitchen. This is a symbolic way of wiping the slate clean for new beginnings. I now know the value of this. Being thorough  with this process, however does take time. Though I have accomplished some of my cleaning up, much remains to be done. For instance, I have yet to go through and scrub down my refrigerator. While I have every intention of tackling this task soon, unfortunately I haven’t found the right time just as yet.

          Still, nothing in there has developed an odor to alert me to an inedible substance that must be discarded. As far as I can tell I have kept up with my leftovers, and there is nothing lurking in its back for me to dispose of. Sadly, my refrigerator does not hold as much as I wish it did. Whenever I do a big shopping I usually have to reshuffle whatever is on the shelves in order to fit in the new items, and that tends to keep things current. I need to do this especially when adding to my freezer which needs to hold things like shrimp on sale as well as an assortment of the good frozen organic vegetables we like so much.  

          I have gone over my desk, organized it and thrown out the various lists, notes and other accumulated paper that were not current. I also threw away a bunch of pens that no longer wrote and put away the ones that did. In addition I purged my wallet of coupons that were not valid because they were past the expiry date. We still have some Christmas gifts that we have not yet managed to connect with their recipients; however I am confident that this will happen in good time. There are still drawers to tidy, and my filing cabinet to go through.

          I can think of more and more if I try. There are writing projects on my computer I haven’t looked at in some time. I could discard them or continue to consider them. There are old poems I could look at and decide whether to keep, revise or eliminate. Yet where do I stop? I might go on cleaning and clearing until summer if I kept at it. At some point I must decide what is enough and what will be too much. Soon I need to stop and decide it’s time to move forward. The space garnered by elimination will help me and that’s a good reason to do so.